ACP Brings Flight Simulators, VR and Robotics to Tormead School
The Schools’ Aerospace Careers Programme made its first visit to Tormead School in Guildford on 23 June 2026, bringing around 110 students together with flight simulators, virtual reality and a four-legged robot while the sun beat down outside.
The day drew students from Years 9, 10 and 12 across three schools, with St Peter’s Catholic School and Guildford County School joining the host. Chris Marshall, Mike Stokes and Ogi Damjanovic delivered the programme, with ACP Trustees Dr Michael Smith and Adrian Jones also in attendance. Fiona Thie, Director of Careers at Tormead, coordinated the visit.
The morning moved through a short sequence of talks. Chris opened with the ACP’s overview of where aviation and engineering are heading, from automation and advanced simulation to the systems thinking behind the move into the Fifth Industrial Revolution. Mike followed with the routes into a flying career, explaining how pilot training is structured and pointing to the operational jobs that keep aircraft moving beyond the flight deck. After a short break, Chris returned with a session on drones, covering how they are used across industry and how he teaches people to fly them. Ogi closed the morning on virtual reality design, showing how creative and engineering work increasingly draw on the same tools. The presentations ended with the students’ first sight of Spot, the quadruped robot built by Boston Dynamics, which holds a conversation through an AI voice system.
The afternoon broke into rotations through the ACP’s technology, where the day’s main development showed itself. The programme’s flight simulator, built in-house and first flown late in 2025, has now grown into a set of three, with two new units making their debut at Tormead. Mike ran all three, setting students landing challenges that quickly turned competitive among friends as they compared how cleanly they could put an aircraft down. Around them, the FPV drone simulators introduced flight control and spatial awareness, the VR design station let students build and explore their own 3D environments with Ogi, and the VR Flight Experience put them inside a cockpit.
With girls making up the large majority of the room, in keeping with Tormead’s intake, the talk kept returning to how broad the field is and how many routes into aerospace and engineering sit well away from the flight deck.
Spot drew the strongest reaction of all. Brought back out for the breakouts, it gave a clear picture of robotics and AI working inside one machine, and the effect on the room was easy to read. One teacher summed it up: “Meeting Spot the robot dog was genuinely jaw dropping.”
The ACP thanks Fiona Thie for organising the visit and welcoming the programme on its first trip to the school, along with St Peter’s Catholic School and Guildford County School for joining.
