The Military-Civil Aviation Crossover: Opportunities and Challenges

Some of the biggest names in aviation training work both sides of the fence. CAE, Boeing, Airbus and Thales all sell into defence and civil aviation, and dozens more do too. The market sizes are close too: by Halldale's own global figures, $10.3bn in military simulation against $5.2bn in civil devices alone, climbing past $13bn with services counted.

However, look at information exchange between the domains and it is a different picture. ITEC 2026 (Europe's largest defence training show) and I/ITSEC 2025 (the world's largest) publish full programmes and we found no obvious direct links to civil aviation. For APATS 2026 and WATS 2026, the two biggest civil-side events, the same holds true in reverse. The companies cross over; the conference programmes barely do.

Despite this paradox, people, methods and technology still move between the two, quietly and mostly unnoticed.

The People

Jamie Anderson has lived on both sides of that boundary. A former military helicopter instructor, he co-founded MAXRES, an AI courseware company, with Curtis Anderson, an ex-

military courseware designer who led a team on the UK's Military Flying Training System (MFTS). The pair built the company on defence work, then went looking for where else needed the same kind of training.

"There's a lot of crossover between military aviation training and civil aviation training," says Anderson, MAXRES's co-founder and chief executive. "The training has to be compliant, and you need to track and deliver against a syllabus. It's technical, safety-critical."

That overlap is what pushed MAXRES into civil aviation in the first place. "It seemed a no-brainer to look at whether we could help in civil aviation too, because they have the same requirements," Anderson says. He learned the civil side by going through it himself, training and licensing as a civilian pilot, and working with Babcock's onshore training team on air ambulance courses.

Training expertise is one form of crossover. The trained people themselves are another, and that movement runs mostly one way, out of the military and into civil aviation, not the reverse. The US Air Force was short around 1,800 pilots as of 2024, according to Air Force data reported by Air & Space Forces Magazine. India's Air Force has a longer-running version of the same problem: its pilot shortfall grew from 486 in 2015 to around 596 by the end of 2021, training capacity, not recruitment, is the constraint, according to Indian defence press reporting. On the maintenance side, roughly 100,000 people leave US military service each year with aviation experience that could convert into a civil licence, and only around 1,500 do, according to figures from the Aviation Technician Education Council (ATEC).

Civil aviation has its own version of the shortage. Boeing's latest Pilot and Technician Outlook puts new commercial pilot demand at over 660,000 globally by 2044; Oliver Wyman separately estimates the US shortfall alone peaking around 24,000 pilots this year.

Different Problems, Similar Skills

Neither sector's training is more advanced than the other's. Where they differ is mostly regulatory. The military tend to judge a simulator by whether it teaches the skill; civil aviation has traditionally certified simulators by fixed category, whatever they teach, though that is starting to change.

Anderson sees the same weakness on both sides: institutional complacency. "You look at the primes, the big companies, and their training teams are often really small for the size of the company," he says. "There's a bit of an attitude of, well, it's good enough, it's worked so far. But the training being delivered was probably designed 20 years ago."

The regulatory response is converging too. Military training was meant to comply with the Defence Systems Approach to Training (DSAT), the UK framework for proving training meets its objectives, Anderson says, "but a lot of it was just a word, it didn't mean anything. People are now checking, and it's being audited." He sees the same shift in civil aviation, with smaller providers increasingly audited by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and found running on dated material.

TJ Moser, strategic account executive at Varjo Technologies, which builds XR flight-training simulators for defence and civil customers, and a former US Air Force pilot, frames the same gap from the other direction. "In the military, simulators are essentially self-certified and used in curricula if they effectively teach skills, irrespective of certification," he says. Judging the tool by the task, not the paperwork, is what Moser calls 'task to tool.' That mindset will gradually influence the civil aviation industry, and EASA, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, is already embracing it through its new FSTD Capability Signature (FCS) framework, which credits devices by capability rather than fixed category.

What Technology Do They Actually Share?

The two sectors increasingly share the same technology, and the same problem: keeping training current when the thing being trained for changes faster than any syllabus can.

"The core flight training fundamentals, instrument proficiency, spatial awareness, emergency procedures, cockpit resource management, are identical across both sectors," Moser says. Extended reality (XR) lowers the cost of practising them: what once needed a multi-million-dollar full-flight simulator can now be delivered in a compact, lower-cost form factor "without compromising on fidelity," cutting time-to-solo flight by 30 to 50%, by Varjo's own figures. "Simply adapting a military solution for civil aviation is not effective," Moser says; technical specifications rarely convince civil training managers, putting a real instructor in the headset does.

MAXRES takes a different route, using generative AI to build training content fast enough to keep pace: in Ukraine, Anderson says, the refresh cycle for a new drone or counter-drone system runs to around six weeks. MAXRES is on contract with BAE Systems on a future military capability, and has a major German airline evaluating its product on the civil side.

Similar Job, Different Uniform

Strip away the regulators, procurement cycles and funding lines, and both sectors do the same underlying job: training human beings for moments that matter.

Moser's own route into civil aviation runs through events like EATS and WATS, where "theoretical interest" turns into "immediate buy-in" once instructors can try the technology. Anderson describes going to Halldale's civil events as how you find your way into a market you didn't grow up in. Halldale itself publishes across both domains, MS&T for defence, CAT for civil aviation, and runs the civil-side events, APATS, WATS and EATS, supporting such crossovers. APATS 2026, opening in Bangkok on 31 August, is where that quiet crossover happens next.