AVATOR is our response to the needs of leading airports and ANSPs to build up and maintain the required skills for new procedures and for operating new systems. Furthermore, the pressure to validate new operational procedures is growing and requires appropriate simulation systems. Since 2005 the system has proven to be a powerful and cost-effective solution preventing training and validation teams from long set-up times in other simulators. The fact that no pseudo pilots are required to operate even large scale setups of the simulation (electronic clearance input and text-to-speech module) is a major cost-saver for our customers. The system is in use for ab-initio and for refresher training of controllers as well as for validation exercises integrating tower automation systems such as A-SMGCS, A-CDM or EFPS.