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The Accidental Market Disruption: How a VR Headset Changed Professional Aviation Training

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabi Riesen, CEO of Loft Dynamics, a flight training platform that’s raised over $29 million, shared a story that started with zero intention of building a business. Back in 2013, he received his first virtual reality development kit—a crude, early version nothing like today’s polished hardware. But something clicked immediately. “The moment I had it in hand, it was for me, like, okay, that’s going to change the world in aviation training now,” Fabi recalled.

What he recognized in that moment would eventually disrupt a several billion dollar industry. But the path from living room prototype to qualified training devices deployed across Europe reveals lessons about go-to-market strategy that extend far beyond aviation.

The Problem Hidden in Plain Sight

Traditional flight simulators cost $20 million or more. Despite these astronomical price tags, they suffer from a fundamental flaw that pilots have simply learned to tolerate. “If you are having a head mounted display, it allows you that if you move the head, the whole environment is moving in a three dimensional, depth perception way,” Fabi explained. “If you watch a TV and you move your head a little bit left to right, it’s still the same picture. But if you do it in reality, you see that everything which is not aligned on the same distance is moving against each other.”

This technical distinction matters enormously. “Having flight simulators, which are 20 million or more, they still have a static projection. So if a pilot is moving a little bit ahead, left and right, nothing changes. So that said, it is simply wrong,” he continued. The consequence? “Because it’s simply wrong, pilots have to adapt their fly skills to learn to fly the simulator.”

Think about that for a moment. Pilots aren’t learning to fly helicopters—they’re learning to fly simulators that behave differently than actual aircraft. The industry had collectively accepted this limitation as the cost of simulation technology.

Building Without a Business Plan

Fabi and his eventual co-founder, who connected through a university project in 2015, didn’t start with a go-to-market strategy. They started with a mission: build the world’s best simulator. The company was founded in 2016, but revenue wasn’t the goal. “Until 2018, our goal was not to create business from that, our goal was to create the world’s best simulator,” Fabi said clearly.

The team operated entirely on passion, working nights and weekends, iterating on prototypes in living rooms. Then in 2018, something unexpected happened. “We’ve been contacted by the European Aviation Authority, based on seeing a YouTube video, what we did,” Fabi shared. A YouTube video led to inbound interest from the people who could make or break their entire concept.

“That’s where they reached out, and we realized that apart from having a passion, we out of a sudden build something where is the real problem,” he explained. This moment marked the transition from passion project to actual business. The European Aviation Authority didn’t just validate the technology—they revealed the market problem that Loft Dynamics could solve.

The 98% That Nobody Sees

Here’s where Fabi’s story diverges sharply from typical startup narratives. Most founders obsess over product development. Fabi learned something counterintuitive: “Building a simulator is 2% of the whole thing, although 98% is making sure that we can qualify the simulator in a regulatory framework from aviation. So that’s basically the main task.”

This insight fundamentally shaped their entire go-to-market approach. In 2018, they decided to “create the whole company into direction that we really generate business.” They secured first launch customers in 2019 and reached breakeven in 2022—a three-year path from serious commercialization to profitability in a highly regulated hardware business.

That 98% became their moat. “By today, we are still on the whole world, the only company which is having qualified simulators using that head mounted technology,” Fabi noted. While competitors might replicate the technology, replicating years of regulatory qualification work proves far more difficult.

The Customer Base That Didn’t Exist

The economics of traditional simulators had created artificial centralization. “Three years ago, there were two simulator centers in whole Europe where it was possible to get a check ride on the H-125 simulators,” Fabi explained. Two centers. For all of Europe. Pilots had to travel extensively just for mandatory training.

By making devices “more than 20 times cheaper,” Loft Dynamics didn’t just expand the existing market—they created an entirely new customer base. “All of a sudden, you have a small helicopter operator which is able to afford their training device instead of sending their pilots far away to a place to get trained,” Fabi said.

This shift demanded product changes beyond the core technology. “We had to build the product first of all much more simple to use,” he explained. The design target became clear: “A flight instructor can make half a day training, and then the flight instructor will be able to use the device with his student or with his pilots without a lot of engineering work needed around.”

Small operators don’t have engineering teams or technical support staff. They needed training devices that worked like appliances, not laboratory equipment. “We also had to create a huge organization which takes care of the customer that machine is always qualified, gets re-qualified, is maintained and so on,” Fabi added. The ongoing compliance infrastructure became as important as the product itself.

The GTM Strategy That Sounds Too Simple

When asked about their marketing strategy, Fabi shared an approach that seems almost naive in its simplicity: “Get the pilot on the device and then it’s a done deal.”

But this only works because of the quality gap. Helicopter pilots historically hate simulators. “In helicopter, people try never to go on the simulator. They hate simulator because the simulator is simply not representative like the real aircraft,” Fabi explained. Decades of poor simulation had created deep skepticism.

Yet once pilots actually experience the difference, conversion is immediate. “The moment most skeptical pilots are sitting on the device, they get hands on, they immediately gone,” he said. “Everyone who is a real pilot immediately understands the big advantage.”

The advantage comes from enabling training that’s impossible elsewhere. “In real helicopter you can’t do a lot of things you should do. You can’t do emergency training and so on. Malfunction training, you can only talk about it on the simulator. You can do real malfunction training,” Fabi explained. When your product creates an emotional experience this different from alternatives, you can build your entire go-to-market around getting people to try it.

Fundraising Aligned with Milestones

The company’s fundraising story reflects the importance of timing and investor education. Starting with friends and family, they eventually raised $20 million in 2022. “We never had to go explicitly and start pitching the idea and so on. It was just perfect timing when we got in contact with those people,” Fabi recalled.

That timing likely aligned with regulatory milestones that dramatically de-risked the venture. But investor selection mattered as much as timing. “The important thing is if you do a product or a service where a lot of passion is involved, it’s important that whoever is becoming an investor also needs to share that passion,” he emphasized.

Investors also needed to “understand the business. It sometimes sounds quite abstract, what’s all happening in the aviation business. So if you just start looking on the numbers without understanding that first, the qualification is needed, that needs time,” Fabi explained. Pure metrics didn’t tell the story—understanding the regulatory journey did.

Market Transformation in Progress

Today, Loft has gone from those two European training centers to “already 15” with “nine will follow very soon.” Each installation represents not just a customer but a fundamental shift in how an industry approaches training.

The vision extends beyond current growth. “Training devices in aviation, they definitely change. It’s not going to be anymore a three story high building. It’s not going to be anymore a training center, which is so expensive that you need to run it 22 hours per day,” Fabi projected.

Instead, training becomes embedded in regular operations. “The training is not anymore centric and it’s much more embedded in the regular workflow from the pilot. So they have the helicopter close to the simulator or they have the aircraft close to the simulator,” he explained. Pilots can “come back from a long flight leg and quickly jump in the simulator to complete the check rather than going home.”

The safety implications matter too. “One third of the accidents is happening during training in helicopter,” Fabi noted. Accessible, realistic simulation could dramatically reduce this number while simultaneously addressing pilot shortages by making training more available.

The Lessons for Hard Tech Founders

Fabi’s journey offers a different playbook for building in regulated markets. Start with the hardest problem. Recognize that regulatory qualification is the product, not an obstacle. Accept that disrupting business models creates political resistance, but “that’s actually also the very nice thing in the approach we are doing.”

Most importantly, understand that when you change economics by 20x, you’re not expanding a market—you’re creating a new one with different customers, different needs, and different operational requirements. Your product, your infrastructure, and your entire organization must transform to serve them.

“Every day we get more requests to be part of the Loft capital,” Fabi shared. “The moment it’s understood how that several billion business is getting disrupted, the appetite is increasing.” The key word there is “understood”—successful go-to-market in disruptive hard tech requires making the market transformation clear, not just demonstrating product superiority.