New SLC training center will help Delta pilots take to the skies while staying on the ground

Everyone makes mistakes, and in some jobs, they are as minor as double-booking a meeting or forgetting to send an email.

But for pilots, the stakes are high, and Delta Air Lines’ new $50 million training facility just west of Salt Lake City International Airport will allow them to get their wings at much lower altitudes.

Gov. Spencer Cox, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and Delta CEO Ed Bastian on Tuesday cut the ribbon to the 50,000-square-foot facility during its grand opening. The training center will serve pilots across the western United States and is Delta’s first to be located beyond its headquarters in Atlanta, giving pilots a new place to hone their skills.

The center marks Delta’s newest investment in Utah’s capital. In late 2022, the airline signed a contract to extend its hub carrier status and continue its financial backing of the Salt Lake City airport’s expansion on concourse B.

“This tells me that it will always be here; that as long as we have a Delta, that Salt Lake City will be a hub,” Cox said Tuesday morning. “We are the crossroads, historically, of the West. We’re the crossroads of the world … in large part, because Delta is located here.”

The new facility’s main attractions are its flight simulators. The building is currently home to one FlightSafety Airbus A350 simulator, but it is equipped with four bays to eventually accommodate simulators for the Airbus A320 and Boeing B737.

Inside the A350 simulator’s roomy cockpit are four seats — one for the pilot and copilot and two for instructors — along with the panels and switches pilots would find inside real planes. The pilots access the mock cockpit by gangplank because the simulator itself is about 8 feet off the ground due to its hydraulic legs.

When pilots board the simulator, the gangway folds up to allow free movement of the cockpit on those hydraulic legs, said Delta spokesperson Michael Thomas.

“It simulates everything from the G-forces that you feel on takeoff, it simulates being pushed back in the seat, just like you would on a real airplane,” Thomas said. “It simulates what the turns feel like, and all that stuff — also things like turbulence and other contingencies that we may need training on.”

The simulators are so true to the experience of flying a real plane that a pilot-in-training’s first flight on an aircraft will have customers on board, Thomas added.

Rick Harper has been flying with Delta for nearly 27 years, and finished training on the Airbus A350 in November after a month of flight simulations back in Atlanta. He said the bulk of a pilot’s training is in the simulator, so the Salt Lake City facility will allow pilots like him to access critical experience outside of the airline’s Georgia headquarters.

“This 50,000-square-foot training center is really about the future,” said Delta Executive Vice President John Laughter. “We strategically placed it here in Salt Lake City not only for our pilots in Salt Lake City, but across the west coast. … There’s a great opportunity to improve not only great quality of training, but quality of life, too, and have our pilots have a really great training center to come to here.”

Beyond the facility’s flight simulators, the building has four flight procedure training rooms, 10 briefing rooms, seven classrooms and emergency equipment training spaces. Delta plans to host over 1,000 training sessions each month at the facility next year, translating to about 1,200 hotel room bookings per month, according to the airline.

“Historically, we’ve consolidated all of the training in Atlanta, and as we’ve looked at the growth we’ve had here, it just made perfect sense to build this facility on many, many, many levels,” Bastian, the airline’s CEO, said. “And Mayor [Mendenhall], when you said that Delta looks good on Salt Lake, well, Salt Lake looks good on Delta too.”