LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It was as close to the real thing as future pilots could get.

From inside, it appeared as if Aidan Bishop was thousands of feet in the air while behind the controls of a 747-style cargo plane. But from outside the simulator, the Atherton High School sophomore was only a few feet off the ground.

“I’m really thinking about becoming a pilot one day,” Bishop said.

Bishop said the state-of-the-art cockpit looks and responds in every way he’d expect a fully loaded cargo plane should.

“It’s really just a matter of how realistic it is; everything is down to the smallest detail, every little thing is there," Bishop said. "It’s all extremely impressive, and it all gives you a really good perspective of just what it’s like." 

Inside the UPS Global Aviation Training Center in Louisville. The center features multiple simulators, giving students an up-close look of what it takes to fly. (Spectrum News 1/Jonathon Gregg)

That’s exactly what the UPS Global Aviation Training Center delivers. It’s the training center for hundreds of pilots throughout the year.

Instead of UPS pilots taking the reigns, students in Atherton's Aerospace program got a crack at the simulators on Friday. Dan Sherlock, UPS Airlines Louisville chief pilot, said it's all about building excitement with a younger generation. 

“These are our future leaders, and that’s what we are doing here today, to build that excitement, get them in the simulator, capture that and give them a road to the future to end up in one of these simulators and training for a great company, a world-class organization like UPS,” Sherlock said.

The simulators offer the exact layouts of the 747-8 cockpit, and hydraulic legs reproduce the sensations of takeoff, flight, landing and breaking. UPS Airlines offers different student internships and illustrates to students the pathways to becoming a cargo pilot.

“It was really, really fun,” said Atherton student Kaelin Johnson after finishing her flight. “It was really exciting, and it was kind of trippy, but it was really fun.”

Bishop said he hopes to fly the real thing someday. 

“It really felt like you could see the individual movements, you could see how the aircraft was affected by every input that you did," he said. "It really felt like you were actually doing the thing. It’s impressive, truly.”

The UPS Global Aviation Training Center opened in 2018. Sherlock said last year, the company hired 300 new pilots.