Top Names in Flight Simulation Take 2002 Pinnacle Awards at Embry-Riddle

The Pinnacle Award for a company will be given to CAE Inc., a global leader in the design and manufacture of full flight simulators and a provider of integrated training solutions for customers in the civil aviation, military, and marine markets. The Canadian company, whose annual revenue exceeds $1 billion, is being honored for its Simfinity software package, a two-dimensional simulator that is accessed on a personal computer but functions like a full flight simulator. Using Simfinity saves time and money compared to full flight simulators, and the advanced skills it teaches ensure a maximum transfer of training to higher-level devices.

The award for an organization will go to the Flight Simulation Engineering and Maintenance Conference, an annual meeting sponsored by ARINC Inc. The goal of the conference, inaugurated in 1995, is to improve the reliability and maintainability of flight simulators and related training equipment while reducing operating costs. Guidelines created by conferees reportedly save the airline industry more than $30 million annually by providing a consistent approach to customer support, technician training, and measurement of simulator quality.

A Pinnacle Award will also be presented to Dietrich Otto, recently retired from the Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA), where he was coordinator of synthetic training devices in the operations division. Otto worked on behalf of JAA to manage an industrywide effort to revise and standardize the International Civil Aviation Organization's Manual of Criteria for the Qualification of Flight Simulators. The finished document will be the basis for common simulator qualification standards throughout the world.

The featured speaker at the event is Ben Delaney, president of CyberEdge Information Services Inc. Delaney is a consultant on the topics of virtual reality, visual simulation, and interactive media.

The Pinnacle Awards dinner and ceremony is 7-10 p.m. at Embry-Riddle's John Paul Riddle Student Center, 600 S. Clyde Morris Blvd., Daytona Beach, Fla. The facility will be transformed by Nightwatch Management Inc., the special-event production company that staged the Tampa Super Bowl halftime show.

The event is $75 per person or $140 per couple, and the deadline for reservations is Sept. 9. Please contact Brad Crews at 386-226-6316 or bradford.crews@erau.edu for reservations or more information.

Embry-Riddle presents Pinnacle Awards every two years for contributions in a specific area of aviation and aerospace. Previous awards were given in 2000 for achievement in aviation safety education. The winners are chosen by an independent panel of aviation and aerospace experts.

Embry-Riddle, the world's largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, meets the needs of students and industry through its educational, training, research, and consulting activities. Embry-Riddle educates 24,000 students annually through the master's level at residential campuses in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Prescott, Ariz., at more than 150 teaching centers in the United States and Europe, and through distance learning.