Virgin Atlantic receives new training rig

Virgin Atlantic airlines received a new cabin evacuation-training rig. It is based in Crawley, U.K., where the company’s cabin crews practice a Safety and Emergency Procedures (SEP) training each year.

The new rig’s sidewalls, overhead lockers and passenger service units came from a Boeing 787 that had been stripped and converted to a private jet. It was built by TFC cabin simulators in Germany, then shipped to the U.K. in three parts and assembled on site.

“It’s great to have more realism, given that so much of what we do is procedure based. And this is a lot more realistic than the old trainer,” said Thomas Burn, cabin crew.

Virgin Atlantic’s Rig Hall features a 747 main deck slide (where every crew member is required to jump down it when they first become a cabin crew member), a slide set up as a raft, emergency location transmitters, loudhailers, lifejackets and other pieces of safety equipment that is carried on each flight. The trainees must practice how to use these until it’s second nature for them. On a training day, the crew also practices shouting the evacuation commands.