PRESS RELEASE: In an effort to safely train its operators for the Amulsar greenfield gold project, Lydian Armenia has chosen simulators with professional services from Immersive.

The operation has a 4km downhill loaded haul with up to 10% grade, creating additional need for operators to be proficient in how to operate the equipment safely, but also how to respond to any emergency, such as the loss of a braking system or a fire.

"Our selection criteria included both the quality of the simulator and the support to implement a system. Immersive's offering for after the sale support was the best among the offerings that we looked at. Even when we looked at a 10-year old simulator, that simulator was still functioning well in the training organisation at a well-established mine," said W. David Tyler, mine technical manager, Lydian International.

Bryant Mullaney, vice-president of managed services at Immersive Technologies, added: "Our goal is to ensure that Lydian receives significant return on investment from Immersive Technologies and our routine advisor support visits add value to a mining operation by having the experience and best practice tools to avoid pitfalls in training programme implementation. The end goal is to drive quantifiable operational improvement in key mine metrics."

Lydian is the first mining company to deploy simulation-based training from Immersive Technologies in Armenia.

"Our view is that this is well-established technology to train new operators. Current operations have new operators train side-by-side for long periods before they are considered well enough trained to be able to operate a multi-million-dollar piece of equipment. Our view was we needed to speed up the training to provide sufficient operators for the mining and at the same time reduce the risk in achieving our ramp up to full commercial operations," Tyler said.