Immersive VR training for Aena's airport teams

TECHNOLOGY

IMMERSIVE TECH

USE CASE

TRAINING

CLIENT

Aena is the world's largest airport operator by passenger volume and a constituent of the Ibex 35 index. It manages 46 airports and two heliports in Spain and holds stakes in airport infrastructure in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Colombia, and Jamaica. Its Aena Ventures programme opens the doors of the airport of the future to the international startup ecosystem.

GOAL ACHIEVED

Design the first virtual reality training platform for Aena's operational teams —firefighters, ground marshallers, and maintenance crews—, capable of scaling to new roles and procedures without starting from scratch.

When Aena set out to train its teams without moving real aircraft, it didn't look for a supplier: it launched a global challenge. DeuSens won it.

Chosen from 500 international startups

Aena launched Aena Ventures with five strategic challenges to reinvent airport operations. More than 500 startups from 40 countries entered the programme. DeuSens was selected to solve the most ambitious of them all: design the virtual environment where the next generation of airport professionals will be trained.

The proposal wasn't a one-off simulator. It was a vision: a common platform on which Aena could build, for years to come, every training programme it might need. The company approved the idea, funded the pilot and, after a six-month validation, opened a two-year deployment contract across its airport network.

One platform built with many roles in mind

The platform was built with many roles in mind. Firefighters, ground marshallers, and maintenance teams all train on the same technological base, each with their own module: objectives, interactions, and assessment criteria tailored to their professional profile.

This changes the economics of learning. When Aena needs to train a new role or roll out a new operational procedure, it doesn't commission a project from scratch: it adds one more module to a living system. The initial investment pays off with every new addition.

Realism you feel with your hands

Immersive training takes its definitive leap when it stops being visual and starts being tactile. With the TouchDIVER Pro haptic gloves from WEART integrated into the platform, trainees press buttons, hold tools, and feel whether a surface is hot or cold with the same response as in real life. The virtual aircraft stops being an image and becomes an environment to interact with.

On that foundation of realism, the platform reproduces the critical points that in an emergency must be located in seconds: doors, compartments, systems, access routes. The trainee repeats the procedure until the body executes it on its own. When the real situation comes —a rescue, a fire— those trained reflexes are the difference between arriving late and arriving on time.

Training that scales without anyone moving

Before, training Aena's operational teams meant gathering professionals from across the network in one location and keeping a real aircraft tied up for days. Now the same training takes place at any work centre, with a headset and a pair of gloves. People don't travel to the training; the training travels to them.

The impact shows in every direction: more teams trained in less time, more precise assessments, contained logistics costs and a real reduction in the emissions tied to mass travel. For DeuSens, this project represents something rare in the sector: the world's first virtual reality training platform for an airport operator.