The Earliest Adopters

Two of the true pioneers of developing AI for aviation training are the father-son team of Adolfo and Mikhail Klassen.

For nearly three decades, Adolfo Klassen held key positions in Montréal, Canada-based CAE, including Director of Aviation Training, VP Engineering and Technology, and ultimately Chief Technology Officer.

In June 2013, he launched the startup Paladin AI with son Mikhail, who had completed his PhD in computational astrophysics at Columbia University.

They developed a training analytics platform, InstructIQ, which integrates with flight simulation devices from every major sim manufacturer and supports aircraft from Airbus, Boeing, Beechcraft, Cessna, and others. It provides flight instructors and pilots with analytics about proficiency and competency and makes training recommendations on how to improve.

An impetus for Paladin, Mikhail Klassen said, was “the amount of data being generated in the training of pilots and how that data wasn’t being fully utilized. What the industry didn’t really need was better flight simulators; what they needed was better teaching methods, better tools for understanding what a pilot really needs, understanding their proficiency and competency.”

InstructIQ, in effect, re-creates the simulator instructor’s grading sheet. “On a session summary page, they can see all of the grades that they’ve assigned. They can see all the grades that our AI has assigned to that pilot, and they can drill down. They can look at each individual maneuver, every part of the lesson plan, and they can unpack the most salient flight parameter data that was detected during that time. We also provide them with an overall picture of the competency of this pilot.”

In its 10-year run, Paladin earned accolades such as one of Quebec’s most innovative AI companies, best pitch in the Boeing Launchpad Canada competition, was mentioned in Forbes magazine, and forged partnerships with an air mobility company, Thales and TXT Group.

But startup funding is always more challenging than technology innovation, it seems. “We had gone through a fairly difficult period in terms of financing. We could have raised some more money, but I was tired of doing it on a shoestring. The scale-up phase is expensive. Airlines need to be comfortable that there’s good backing, vis-a-vis a company that may or may not continue to exist. That was always the case in the traditional simulator industry when somebody new came along. How long will they survive? It’s a weird industry; you have the one and then you have some others,” Adolfo explained. [Through the pandemic], “we continued to build, we had a pretty good AI tech stack. In many ways we were ready for prime time, but it still required a bit more petty cash.” 

In late 2023, TXT Group acquired the InstructIQ technology from Paladin, and Adolfo became AI Training Solutions Lead / Director for TXT’s PACE. Mikhail is now part of the applied machine learning team at Planet, which operates the largest fleet of earth-imaging satellites.

The Klassens have another family business: Klassen Argentina Wines, a high-altitude, boutique vineyard in South America, started the same year as Paladin AI, with a mission to create “unforgettable and unique wines.”

Excerpted from The Robot in the Simulator: Artificial Intelligence in Aviation Training by Rick Adams, FRAeS – https://aviationvoices.com/shop/