As one of the Army’s elite Night Stalker helicopter pilots,
Michael Durant flew some of the most dangerous missions imaginable.
He prepared for battle in conditions few others could bear.
For Durant, training in his Black Hawk helicopter was more than
just part of the daily routine. “Practice defined the lives
of the Night Stalkers. ... They practiced everything, even crashing,”
Mark Bowden wrote in his highly acclaimed account of the 1993 battle
of Mogadishu, “Black Hawk Down.”
Durant survived a treacherous helicopter crash during what became
known as the longest sustained firefight involving American troops
since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, U.S. Army Rangers and
Delta commandos were sent to capture two top lieutenants of a Somali
warlord in Mogadishu. Durant’s Black Hawk was shot down by
a Somali rocket-propelled grenade. He was captured and held as a
prisoner of war for 11 days.
Despite serious injuries, Durant survived, in large part, thanks
to the intensive training he underwent during his years with the
Night Stalkers. “I felt like I was as prepared as I could
have been,” he said.
Durant has spent much of his time since his retirement, almost
two years ago, advocating better aviation training for Army pilots.
He works as an executive with Sterling, Va.-based NLX Corporation,
which makes military trainers and flight simulators.
Durant noted that as a military contractor, he isn’t “the
customer anymore,” but his past military experience “gives
you an idea of what those requirements really are. It goes beyond
the written word, because there are still a lot of things that need
to be interpreted,” he explained.
Among the problems that the Army should address, Durant told National
Defense, is a decline in the number of practice flying hours for
young aviators, who will likely end up fighting in rough areas of
the world. There has been a shortage of advanced simulators that
can provide realistic training so pilots can be better prepared
for unconventional combat, he said.
“The average Army pilot today does not have the number of
flying hours in the actual aircraft—as we did,” Durant
stressed. Durant retired with approximately 3,700 flight hours,
with 1,400 of them using night vision goggles.
Army pilots also need to improve their preparation for landing
in rough and sandy terrain. The only way to do that is through simulation,
Durant said.
In Afghanistan, “we recognize that was a shortcoming in the
overall training,” he said. Training for landings, where sand
can create brownout conditions, for example, “is something
you do not want to do in the real world more than you have to, and
you do not want to attempt it without having been sufficiently trained.”
Only a few U.S. Army bases are located at high altitudes, which
means that the service should rely on simulators to replicate harsh
weather conditions and rugged terrain, said Durant.
The challenge for Army aviators is that they often have to land
on unimproved areas, where there has been no previous reconnaissance,
he said. Pilots regularly land at night with the help of night-vision
goggles. “Although you do reconnaissance with a map, you have
no idea what the actual landing conditions are until you get there.”
The Army has had a growing appreciation of the benefits of simulation
in recent years, but still has room for improvement.
Part of the reason, Durant said, is that the aircraft is “so
expensive that we can’t afford to fly them.” Also, until
now, many of the simulation devices were not “of sufficient
quality to offset the lack of flying hours,” he said.
But there is also a cost benefit for replacing certain forms of
live training with simulation. “If you do it in the simulator
first, you are much less likely to damage any aircraft. With the
helicopters in particular, the rotor system generates a lot of dust,
and, in unimproved areas, it creates a brownout condition,”
he said.
Although simulators have become more capable, they have to keep
up with the complexity of the aircraft subsystems. “It’s
not flying by the seat of your pants anymore,” said Durant.
“Now, the cockpits are so complicated that they require a
lot more training.” Tasks such as mission management, maintenance
and crew coordination require a lot of time for “button pushing,”
said Durant.
He emphasized that it is a lot safer and “more effective
to learn how to operate the cockpits in a controlled environment
rather than let [the students] learn while flying the aircraft.”
Simulation, however, is not a cure-all remedy for the Army’s
training shortfalls, Durant noted. Army leaders need to figure out
the right balance between training in simulation devices and in
the actual aircraft.
“There is clearly a place where simulation is effective and
there is a place where it is not,” he said. “The key
is to apply these [simulation] tools for the right task and the
right proficiency level, because it makes the time spent in the
actual aircraft much more valuable.
“I could spend, hypothetically, six hours in a simulator
and four in the helicopter and learn it even better, rather than
learning how to fly for 10 hours in a helicopter,” he added.
However, he noted that simulation technology has significant limitations
and only should be considered a supplement to flying real aircraft.
To be effective, a simulator has “to go hand-in-hand with
advancements in the training system.” The biggest challenge,
he said, is that simulators can become obsolete very quickly because
the technology matures at a rapid speed. Training devices are meant
to be around for 20 years, “but you have to preplan your technology
insertion so that the system can support the technological advances,”
he said.
The simulation industry also has to keep up with the computer-games
industry, which is always a leap ahead, said Durant. “The
average young pilots come in having flown a Microsoft simulator,
played Nintendo and Playstation when they were kids. The fidelity
of those systems has become really good, so they have very high
expectations [of the training simulators]. ... We have to make them
at least as good or better,” he said.
In the simulation business, he said, “we have to face reality
and understand that you can’t completely recreate a combat
environment. You can come close by task saturation. You put a lot
of pressure on people to perform their tasks simultaneously, but
there comes a point where you can’t make it more realistic.”
The pilots, he said, need to “know everything about the machine,”
and the tactics. “That is as prepared as I can be. ... What
happens after that is beyond our control. You have to count on the
fact that your people are going to react well under pressure.”
One of the reasons flight simulators have become so valuable to
aviation training is because of their ability to inject failures
and adverse weather conditions. “Those kinds of capabilities
you can’t recreate in real training conditions,” he
said. “In simulators, you can fail an engine 50 times. You
can shoot the aircraft on takeoff and see how the crew reacts.”
Ironically, the virtual world sometimes can be more realistic than
the actual situation. He noted that training scenarios should be
prepared well in advance and deal with every contingency—from
bad weather, to enemy air defenses and small-arms fire. “You
have to make sure that the crew is not lulled into a sense of security
or boredom,” he said.
In Durant’s opinion, the Army should rely more on the “building
block approach” to make training more effective. The fact
that soldiers are being moved around a lot and are not able to stay
together enough as a cohesive unit may negatively affect training
readiness, Durant said. “Your more experienced people are
leaving, and the new ones come in, and it is not coordinated. It
is kind of random,” he said.
If people were managed by unit, and trained the fundamental tasks
together, he said, then they would go into a mission-ready cycle
as a unit and could be deployed together in places like Afghanistan,
for example. “With the current system, you lose the cohesiveness,”
Durant said. “Even in real combat you have people coming and
going.”