The Story of Loft Dynamics: Building the Future of Professional Flight Training

The Story of Loft Dynamics: Building the Future of Professional Flight Training

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabi Riesen, CEO of Loft Dynamics, a flight training platform that’s raised over $29 million, described the moment everything changed. It was 2013, and he’d just received his first virtual reality development kit—primitive by today’s standards, but revolutionary in his hands. “The moment I had it in hand, it was for me, like, okay, that’s going to change the world in aviation training now,” he recalled.

Most people saw a gaming device. Fabi saw the solution to a problem the aviation industry had tolerated for decades.

The Problem Nobody Questioned

To understand Loft Dynamics, you need to understand what’s fundamentally broken about traditional flight simulators. Despite costing $20 million or more, they fail at the most basic level: representing reality.

“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.”

Traditional simulators use static projections. “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 noted.

The consequence of this fundamental flaw? “Because it’s simply wrong, pilots have to adapt their fly skills to learn to fly the simulator.” Think about that. Pilots weren’t learning to fly helicopters—they were learning to fly simulators that behaved differently than actual aircraft. The entire industry had accepted this as inevitable.

From Passion Project to Accidental Business

Fabi’s path to founding Loft Dynamics wasn’t conventional. He’d been an engineer for 20 years at a large company. Aviation had always been his passion—he earned his private pilot license in 1999—but poor eyesight had closed the door to becoming a professional pilot. So he channeled that passion into engineering.

The VR headset in 2013 was his eureka moment, but execution took time. By 2015, he’d connected with what would become Loft’s CTO through a university project. In 2016, they founded the company with a simple mission: “We wanted to build the world’s best simulator.”

Notice what’s missing from that mission statement: any mention of revenue, customers, or market strategy. “Until 2018, our goal was not to create business from that, our goal was to create the world’s best simulator,” Fabi explained. The team worked nights and weekends, iterating on prototypes, driven purely by passion and technical challenge.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

The YouTube Video That Validated Everything

“In 2018, we’ve been contacted by the European Aviation Authority, based on seeing a YouTube video, what we did,” Fabi recalled.

A YouTube video. The European Aviation Authority—the gatekeepers who could make or break their entire concept—reached out after seeing a video. No pitch deck, no formal presentation, just evidence of what they’d built.

“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,” Fabi explained. This wasn’t just customer validation—it was regulatory validation. And in aviation, regulatory validation matters infinitely more.

This moment marked the transition from passion project to actual business. In 2018, they decided to “create the whole company into direction that we really generate business.”

The 98% That Becomes the Moat

Most startups would assume the hard part was over. They had working technology, regulatory interest, and a clear market need. Fabi learned otherwise.

“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,” he explained.

That 98%—the regulatory qualification work—would take years and become their most valuable asset. “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 could potentially replicate the technology, they couldn’t shortcut the qualification timeline.

The path from regulatory interest to first revenue moved steadily. They secured launch customers in 2019. By 2022, just three years after serious commercialization began, they reached breakeven.

Discovering an Entirely New Market

As Loft Dynamics entered the market, they realized something fundamental: they weren’t just offering a better simulator—they were creating an entirely new customer base.

Traditional simulator economics had forced 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 shared. Two training centers. For all of Europe. Pilots had to travel extensively just for mandatory training.

By making simulators “more than 20 times cheaper,” everything changed. “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 explained.

These weren’t just new customers—they were completely different customers. Training centers had engineering teams and technical staff. Small operators had pilots who needed something that “just works.” This demanded radical product evolution.

“We had to build the product first of all much more simple to use,” Fabi explained. The goal became training a flight instructor in half a day, after which “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.”

The company also had to build extensive service infrastructure. “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,” he noted. Small operators couldn’t handle regulatory compliance themselves.

The Convert-Through-Experience Strategy

Entering this market presented a unique challenge: helicopter pilots 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. But this skepticism became an advantage once pilots actually tried the device. The company’s go-to-market strategy centers on one simple principle: “Get the pilot on the device and then it’s a done deal.”

“The moment most skeptical pilots are sitting on the device, they get hands on, they immediately gone,” Fabi said. The conversion happens because “everyone who is a real pilot immediately understands the big advantage.”

That advantage comes from enabling training 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.

The Market Transformation Accelerates

The results of this approach are visible in their growth trajectory. From two training centers in Europe three years ago, Loft has expanded to “already 15” with “nine will follow very soon.” Each installation doesn’t just represent a customer—it represents a fundamental shift in how helicopter training works.

The company’s disruption has attracted increasing investor interest. “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.”

But investor selection remained deliberate. “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. Beyond passion, investors needed to “understand the business. It sometimes sounds quite abstract, what’s all happening in the aviation business.”

The Future: Redefining Aviation Training Infrastructure

Looking ahead, Fabi sees transformation extending far beyond Loft’s current footprint. “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,” he explained.

The entire model of centralized, expensive training infrastructure becomes obsolete. Instead, “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.”

This integration into regular operations means pilots won’t “first need to travel one day to get afterwards into a simulator with the wrong visual system at 02:00 in the morning.” Instead, they 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 extend industry-wide. “One third of the accidents is happening during training in helicopter,” Fabi noted. Accessible, realistic simulation could dramatically reduce this statistic. Meanwhile, making training more available means “the pilot shortage is going to be not anymore so high.”

Beyond helicopters, the technology applies naturally to fixed-wing aircraft and eVTOLs. Having proven the concept in the most demanding environment—helicopter flight close to the ground—expansion into adjacent markets becomes straightforward.

Loft Dynamics started with an engineer holding a VR headset in his living room, seeing possibilities nobody else recognized. Today, they’re rebuilding the infrastructure of professional aviation training, one simulator at a time. The story isn’t about technology—it’s about recognizing that sometimes the most expensive, established solutions are simply wrong, and being willing to spend years proving there’s a better way.