How Pinnacle Solutions is transforming military maintenance training with Unity-powered virtual twins

Delivering measurable improvements in maintenance readiness

• 85%+ of maintainers preferred Virtual Maintenance Training over traditional instruction, improving engagement and learning outcomes as per a study with Brigham Young University.
• 17% higher end-of-course test scores achieved when Virtual Maintenance Training was used alongside classroom and hands-on instruction and
• nearly 10% better knowledge retention, helping maintainers build confidence before working on operational aircraft according to research by Arizona State University in partnership with Anacapa Sciences, Inc.
• Reduced dependence on operational aircraft, lowering equipment wear, fuel costs, and maintenance-related training expenses while improving aircraft availability.
• Fielded across multiple U.S. military organizations and allied nations, supporting scalable aircraft maintenance training in classrooms, operational units, and distributed learning environments worldwide.
• Supports faster, standardized maintainer qualification through immersive virtual twins, guided procedures, performance analytics, and instructor-led assessment.

Together, these outcomes demonstrate how Unity-powered virtual maintenance training helps defense organizations improve readiness, accelerate workforce development, reduce reliance on operational equipment, and deliver consistent, data-driven training at scale.

Building the future of aircraft maintenance training

Modern military aircraft are becoming increasingly sophisticated, placing greater demands on the technicians responsible for keeping them mission-ready. Yet maintenance training has traditionally relied on classroom instruction, technical manuals, and limited access to operational aircraft, making it difficult to provide hands-on experience while preserving valuable equipment.

For more than a decade, Pinnacle Solutions, an Akima company, has been helping military and aerospace organizations address this challenge through Unity-powered Virtual Maintenance Trainers (VMTs). Using highly detailed virtual twins, the company enables maintainers to safely learn and practice complex procedures before working on operational aircraft. Today, Pinnacle's training solutions support the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, National Guard, Special Operations, and allied defense organizations across a wide range of aviation platforms.

One of Pinnacle's latest projects is the T-7A Red Hawk Maintenance Training System (MTS). Built on the company's Unity-based VXT (i.e., Virtual “Anything” Trainer) architecture, the system combines a highly detailed virtual twin of the aircraft with interactive lessons, simulated fault diagnosis, and instructor-led training. The result is a scalable training solution that helps maintainers build confidence and proficiency while giving instructors new ways to standardize, measure, and continuously improve training outcomes.

When learning depends on the aircraft

For decades, military maintenance training relied heavily on classroom instruction, printed technical manuals, instructor demonstrations, and hands-on practice using operational aircraft. While these methods remain essential, they also present significant challenges. Aircraft availability is often limited, training can be constrained by operational demands, and mistakes made during early learning carry real costs in terms of safety, equipment wear, and mission readiness.

As aircraft systems have become more advanced, these challenges have only grown. Training organizations must prepare larger numbers of maintainers to work on increasingly complex platforms while keeping pace with evolving configurations, updated technical data, and new mission equipment. At the same time, they need consistent ways to assess proficiency across geographically dispersed units without relying solely on expensive physical trainers or operational aircraft.

Pinnacle developed its VMT platform to complement traditional maintenance instruction with immersive, repeatable training that can be delivered anytime, anywhere. By allowing maintainers to practice complete maintenance procedures, troubleshoot faults, and safely learn from mistakes in a realistic virtual environment, the platform helps:

• Build confidence and proficiency before students transition to live aircraft
• Make hands-on maintenance instruction safer, more scalable

Building virtual twins for real-world maintenance

At the heart of Pinnacle's VMT product line is the company's Unity-powered VXT architecture, a common development platform that enables immersive maintenance training across desktop, classroom, web, and XR environments using a single simulation and lesson data set. Rather than developing separate applications for each device, Pinnacle builds training content once and deploys it across multiple delivery formats while maintaining a consistent user experience.

The latest example is the T-7A Red Hawk Maintenance Training System (MTS). Built from CAD and engineering data, the virtual twin recreates the aircraft down to the individual components maintainers interact with during real maintenance procedures. The current model contains around 80,000 unique meshes, allowing students to explore complete aircraft systems, perform guided and unguided maintenance tasks, diagnose faults using simulated test equipment, and practice realistic maintenance workflows in a safe virtual environment.

Because the platform is built around a shared simulation and lesson architecture, instructors can deliver consistent training across classrooms, individual workstations, and immersive XR environments while tracking student performance through SCORM and xAPI integration with existing learning management systems.

Inside the application: learning by doing

Rather than limiting training to theory or isolated components, Pinnacle's VMT allows maintainers to interact with complete aircraft systems in ways that closely mirror real maintenance operations.

Users can:

• Navigate highly detailed virtual twins of complete aircraft and major subsystems
• Learn maintenance procedures through guided or unguided training modes
• Diagnose and resolve faults using simulated test equipment
• Visualize complex assemblies using X-ray, isolate, expand, and annotation tools
• Practice maintenance tasks repeatedly without consuming aircraft hours or risking damage to operational equipment
• Track progress and performance through integrated instructor and learning management systems

The platform also includes a Sandbox authoring environment that enables instructors to build custom lessons, create interactive quizzes, develop animated walkthroughs, and tailor training to specific aircraft configurations or mission requirements, all within the same application. By combining immersive visualization with structured instruction and detailed performance analytics, Pinnacle transforms traditional maintenance training into a scalable, data-driven learning experience.

Building with Unity: scaling high-fidelity maintenance training

Unity provides the real-time 3D foundation behind Pinnacle's VXT architecture, enabling the company to develop, optimize, and deploy highly detailed maintenance trainers from a single development environment.

The team uses Unity throughout the entire production pipeline:

Unity Editor:

Unity Editor is the central development environment where engineering data, interactive training content, simulation logic, and instructional experiences are brought together into a single application.

Universal Render Pipeline (URP):

URP delivers consistent visual quality across desktop, web, and XR deployments while supporting the extremely high part counts required for detailed aircraft maintenance training.

XR packages and Input System:

Unity's XR tools and Input System enable the same application to support desktop PCs, VR headsets, and multiple input devices, including standard mice, 3D mice, and XR controllers, without maintaining separate codebases.

Build Profiles:

A single Unity project is used to generate PC, web, and XR builds, allowing the team to tailor deployment for each platform while maintaining one shared simulation and lesson data set.

Performance optimization:

Maintenance training presents unique technical challenges because users may need to inspect virtually every component of an aircraft. Pinnacle combines Unity's Level of Detail (LOD) system and occlusion culling with its own proprietary distance-based culling pipeline to efficiently manage tens of thousands of individual aircraft components while maintaining real-time performance across PCs, tablets, and XR devices.

By building its own production pipeline around Unity, Pinnacle has created a flexible foundation that allows new aircraft platforms, immersive technologies, and future AI capabilities to be integrated without redesigning the underlying architecture.

Designed to grow with every platform

Pinnacle's VMT platform has been developed as a long-term product architecture rather than a collection of standalone applications. Built on the Unity-powered VXT core, every new aircraft, engine, or subsystem adds to a common foundation that can be reused across future programs, accelerating development while maintaining consistency across training environments.

This product-line approach enables Pinnacle to rapidly expand into new aviation, ground, maritime, and unmanned platforms without rebuilding its software from the ground up. At the same time, advances in LIDAR scanning, CAD conversion, object recognition, and AI-assisted modelling are helping reduce development time while increasing the fidelity of future virtual twins.

The roadmap also includes deeper adoption of VR and XR, distributed multi-user training, AI-enhanced content generation, and intelligent performance analytics, ensuring the platform continues to evolve alongside customer requirements and emerging technologies.

Beyond the classroom: rethinking maintenance training

As military platforms become more advanced and maintenance workforces become increasingly distributed, defense organizations are looking beyond traditional classroom instruction toward more flexible, data-driven approaches to workforce development.

By combining high-fidelity virtual twins with immersive real-time 3D experiences, Pinnacle enables organizations to standardize maintenance training across classrooms, operational units, and partner nations while reducing dependence on operational aircraft and costly physical training equipment. The same virtual twin can support classroom instruction, self-paced learning, immersive XR experiences, and point-of-need training from a shared simulation and lesson data set.

This approach helps organizations improve readiness, accelerate qualification, and maintain training continuity, even when aircraft availability, travel, or operational demands limit traditional hands-on instruction. As real-time 3D, virtual twins, AI, and immersive technologies continue to mature, they are laying the foundation for a more connected, scalable, and resilient approach to defense maintenance training.

Shaping the future of maintenance training

Pinnacle's vision extends beyond individual aircraft programs to a platform-agnostic ecosystem capable of supporting maintenance training across air, ground, maritime, and unmanned systems. At the centre of that vision is the Unity-powered VXT architecture, a stable, extensible foundation designed to incorporate new technologies without repeated re-architecture.

Future development will focus on expanding virtual twin capabilities through AI-assisted content creation, CAD and digital thread integration, enhanced XR experiences, and more adaptive, data-driven training. Pinnacle is also exploring emerging AI-powered rendering techniques that could deliver even greater visual fidelity while reducing the size and complexity of underlying 3D assets, making high-fidelity maintenance training more efficient to develop and deploy.

By combining Unity's real-time 3D platform with advances in AI, immersive technology, and virtual twin development, Pinnacle is helping shape the future of aircraft maintenance training, giving defense organizations the tools to build more capable maintainers, improve readiness, and support mission success for years to come.