The Marine Corps’ roadmap for building a new suite of flight
simulators is driven by the need to offer aviators wider and more
frequent access to training equipment, officials said.
The military services today envision that their simulation-based
flight trainers will be “networked,” said Navy Capt.
Rory H. Fisher, program manager for aviation training at the Naval
Air Systems Command. “The Marine Corps simulator master plan
is attempting to do that, to take all the Marine platforms and create
a network of flight simulators.” The trainers will be applicable
to all model series—the AV-8 Harrier, the F/A-18 Hornet, the
EA-6B Prowler, the KC-130, and the AH-1W, UH-1N, CH-46E and CH-53E
helicopters. The program’s “end product,” said
Fisher, will be “networked flight simulators, both fixed-site
and removable.”
Last March, the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division
(NAWC-TSD) awarded Lockheed Martin Information Systems, based in
Orlando, Fla., a contract worth up to $300 million to develop the
Marine Corps simulator master plan. The company is expected to provide
crew training, including simulator operations and maintenance, for
all U.S. Marine Corps aircraft.
Jo-Anne Puglisi, program manager for the Marine Corps simulator
master plan at Lockheed Martin, said the plan is to build a suite
of simulators for the Corps’ operational squadrons. “They
are looking for the ability to train the operational pilots in their
own squadrons and network together, across each community and across
the entire Marine aviation community,” Puglisi said in an
interview. “It’s a local network and a wide area network
for all Marine aviation.”
All the devices in this program will be new, she said. There will
be “no legacy trainers.” During the first year of the
contract, the company only will perform a “detailed systems
engineering analysis,” said Puglisi. That means, “looking
at each platform and its mission, looking at the technology in the
training community,” such as image generators, displays and
networking software.
Lockheed expects that NAWC-TSD will award a contract to start building
the trainers in March 2001. The entire project, said Puglisi, should
continue for about four to five more years. “We are spending
12 months doing the systems engineering and coming up with an agreement
on requirements.” The original Navy solicitation called for
the procurement of two to four trainers per year. When the contract
was announced in March, Lockheed estimated that 17 simulators would
be completed by 2007.
These will be “deployable trainers,” Puglisi said,
“in the sense that they are inside enclosures that can be
put on an 18-wheeler or on the back of an aircraft and deploy. ...
They require a couple of days of installation and setup.”
The goal was to eliminate the need for expensive permanent facilities,
because the trainers are designed to be used by operational squadrons,
not training squadrons.
There are 16 companies on Lockheed’s team for this program,
but the firm has yet to decide how much of the work will be outsourced
or performed in-house, Puglisi said. In a somewhat unusual arrangement,
NAWC-TSD will be a program subcontractor, designing subsystems and
hardware, developing code and software and conducting systems integration.
The trainers will include a combination of PC-based and high-end
systems. “That is one of the technology trade studies being
done in the contract,” he explained. “We are working
with aviation instructors at the Marine Air Warfare Tactics Squadron,
in Yuma, Ariz.” They are weapon tactics instructors who set
the standards for Marine tactics training. “They are looking
for high-fidelity trainers.” Puglisi said. “PC is a
technology we plan on using, but high-end is a definite requirement.”
The existing “legacy” trainers will be kept in the
training squadrons. The new trainers are for the squadrons that
never had trainers before.