How aircraft crash-landing simulation brings teams together

Picture this. Kicking back, you’re relaxing on a flight to a much-awaited destination. Savouring a hot meal while watching a movie you missed to catch in the cinema. Everything seems normal.

The usual, a kid crying in the far corner and a middle-aged dad-like-figure snoring away in the other. Until the seatbelt sign lights up. And the movie screen swaps for a passenger announcement. An emergency announcement. The flight dips. So does your heartbeat. Turbulence all around.

Chances are, if you’ve ever been on an airplane, it is the ‘T’ word you want to avoid at all costs. But it is also in times like these, times of turbulence — whether literally or figuratively — that you look to people around you, albeit strangers on an aircraft, in hopes of finding a glimpse of relief. And it is this very spirit that a Dubai-based company captures while creating their latest team-building exercise.

The Team Space recently partnered up with Dynamic Advanced Training group, an aircraft safety and training facility, to create a hyper-real simulation of turbulence on an airplane to facilitate team-building exercises. But how does a ‘doomsday’ scenario actually translate to teams coming together, working with each other and strengthening their ties as a cohort?

“You bring your team here and we can put you into all sorts of uncertain, unpredictable circumstances and situations where you don’t know what’s going to happen. Anything could go wrong, anything could go right. And there’s an opportunity for you to have an extremely realistic experience, using it as a vehicle for learning lessons about yourself and your team in real life,” says Andy Fieldhouse, founder and coach, The Team Space.

Quite literally tossing individuals around in a turbulent airplane, the team-building exercise requires participants to withstand challenging scenarios that mimic emergency situations, harsh weather conditions, heavy rains and rough terrains. “This is a way of coming together and getting it wrong in a safe place. If you make mistakes here, they’re learning opportunities,” adds Fieldhouse, who’s also the author of Getting Teamwork Right.

“When you come under pressure situations, you experience uncertainty. You need to build resilience and agility to deal with those situations. And we all know that Covid has led to similar experiences of uncertainty for every team in the world,” says the coach. “A lot of my work with the teams currently is around what to do next, how to stay together and communicate more effectively.”

In the half or full-day programme, teams can experience realistic scenarios in advanced cabin simulators, which create true-to-life flight incidents like rapid decompression, oxygen masks dropping down, sudden, unexpected turbulence and situations like smoke in the cabin.

Teams can be divided into groups of passengers and crew, where they have to manage the evacuation from the aircraft safely using emergency inflatable slides. “To begin with, it’s actually quite normal and amusing. Everyone’s on the airplane, getting used to the environment. But then suddenly something can go wrong,” says Fieldhouse.

The facility also has jungle and polar rooms simulating severe weather environments and landscapes and a 3.5-metre-deep wave pool, where participants have to get into life rafts in an ‘open sea’ simulation. “We can simulate normal, abnormal and emergency situations.

There might be severe, unexpected crash landing experiences and smoke in the cabin, with speakers playing screaming noises. The job of everyone on board is to get off the aircraft safely,” explains the coach.

The visceral experience ends with a debriefing session, where these experiences translate to meaningful team-level conversations. “The real power is in the debrief conversation that comes as part of the experience. It’s probably the most important thing. We do everything so we can have the conversation for you to really learn from the experience,” the coach adds.