Recent investments by the U.S. Navy in flight training technologies
denote a focus on systems that are easy to use and to transport
to remote locations around the world, even on ships.
Nevertheless, these systems still remain in the prototype phase,
and it is not clear what the Navy’s strategy will be for purchasing
deployable trainers in large quantities. Most of the questions revolve
around funding and technological requirements.
“There is a move philosophically toward deployable, reconfigurable
transportable flight trainers,” said Navy Capt. Rory H. Fisher,
program manager for aviation training at the Naval Air Systems Command.
During a recent interview, Fisher noted that the Navy had been
experimenting with portable trainers for quite some time. A case
in point is a Boeing-developed flight-squadron trainer, which has
been deployed on carriers. The Seattle-based company also produced
a so-called tactical trainer technology demonstrator.
More recently, the Office of Naval Research sponsored the transportable
strike/assault rehearsal system (TSTARS), a flight training system
that can be packaged in an ISO container and deployed on aircraft
carriers. The TSTARS program was a technology demonstration scheduled
for completion in September 2000. The prime contractor is Evans
& Sutherland Corporation, based in Salt Lake City.
These attempts notwithstanding, said Fisher, “There are no
operational transportable, reconfigurable, deployable simulators
in the inventory today.” At one point, there were plans to
award a production contract for the TSTARS system under a program
called DTATS, for deployable tactical training system. But that
program, said Fisher, “will not be moving forward in the near
future.”
The Navy’s decision to postpone the trainer purchase can
be attributed to budgetary and technological reasons, said Fisher.
“If you wait just a little bit, we’ll have a little
bit better technology” in areas such as PC-based imagery,
for example, he said. “Philosophically, we are going to move
that way.”
DTATS, he said, “will happen in three to four years. If we
wanted to build it today, we probably could.” But the technology
is improving at such a rapid rate that the Navy would benefit from
a wait-and-see attitude, he said. “We are just now at the
point where the real cost benefits are coming in with PC-based imagery.
Waiting a year is pretty prudent. But it still will not have the
fidelity that the larger simulators have.”
The transportable systems developed so far, Fisher said, “are
low-cost but they don’t give all the technology that we want.
They are in the $2 million to $3 million price range.
“The devices we are producing as containerized vans, called
tactical operational flight trainers, run $7 million to $10 million,”
he said. That price range is much lower than the $20 million to
$40 million the Navy has paid for dome simulators in the past, Fisher
added.
Simulators, he noted, cannot replace flight hours, but can help
maintain combat skills while at sea. “I don’t think
we are going to move during the next three to four years towards
substituting simulator hours for flight hours. But there is a need
to address decreasing readiness while at sea.
“You want to be able to do some things in a simulator to
keep sharp, but the only reason we want to go to the transportable
[systems] is because technology is going to allow us to do that,”
Fisher asserted. “We couldn’t do it 10 years ago. The
fidelity wasn’t good enough. The cost and footprint [were
too high]. Now everything has come together.
“We are even going to PC-based image generators instead of
the large visual systems.”
Fisher does not buy into claims made by companies that they can
build low-cost simulators for less than $100,000. (related story
p. 65) “I don’t believe it. They don’t believe
it either,” he said. Those low-end simulators, however, can
be useful for specialized learning needs. Fisher calls them “micro-sims.”
There is a difference between “micro-sims” and flight
simulators, he stressed. In order to teach a pilot how to fly, a
simulator has to be realistic. “It can’t look like a
game. It has to have a handle just like the real airplane.”
The low-cost simulators, he believes, cannot be flight simulators.
“But there is a role for micro-sims today.” These can
help to teach a pilot certain skills, such as how to operate an
instrument on the airplane, Fisher explained, “and bring you
to a learning point faster. They don’t necessarily make you
a better pilot.”
Using a “micro-sim,” he said, a pilot can learn how
to operate a piece of equipment faster than by reading a book. “The
cost of picking up that specialized skill in an airplane is much
higher than doing it in a simulator or a micro-sim. When you get
in an airplane, having learned that skill is helpful even though,
over the long run, it will not make someone a better pilot. ...
It’s a learning aid, not a replacement.”
The same could be said about commercial video games, said Fisher.
One example is the Fleet Command game, which the Navy recently incorporated
into its officer training program at the Naval Academy. “Those
can teach you thought processes. But they are not a substitute,”
said Fisher. “They teach you a process faster, through repetition.”
These games, he stressed, “have to be viewed as training aids
and not games. You have to figure out how to make them as real as
possible so that the person knows there are consequences for his
[or her] actions.”
One undesired consequence would be “negative training,”
he explained. “In micro-sims, you really have to worry about
negative training.” Negative training occurs when a pilot,
for example, makes unsafe maneuvers in a simulator and then replicates
them in live flying, potentially risking lives and aircraft. “You
have to understand what the training is for and what the outcome
is supposed to be.”
Navy scientific and research efforts currently are focusing on
technologies such as mapping, imagery, and distributed learning
capabilities for Internet-based courses, said Fisher. “Advanced
distributed learning is the top technology priority we have today.”
Transportable Trainer
The simulation and training industry, meanwhile, is watching the
Navy’s investment decisions closely, trying to anticipate
the service’s requirements in an increasingly competitive
marketplace.
In the case of the TSTARS technology demonstration, it appears
that not all the Navy’s goals were achieved, said Dee A. Chandler,
spokeswoman for the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division
(NAWC-TSD), in Orlando, Fla. The system was conceived as a forward-deployable
mission-rehearsal device, with advanced visual imagery—particularly
in the area of sensor domains, such as night-vision and infrared.
“The three most difficult challenges have been to develop
real-time physics based pixel-level simulations for the forward
looking infrared (FLIR), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and night
vision goggle (NVG) sensors to support aviation mission rehearsal
from a single online database,” Chandler said in a written
statement to National Defense. “The FLIR simulation has been
the most difficult to implement because of the number of physics-based
algorithms that must be implemented.” The FLIR simulation
problem, said NAWC-TSD, only can be solved with an image generator
that supports specialized textures and color dynamics. “Encoding
the material properties into the database has also been a challenge.”
TSTARS started four years ago as a research program funded jointly
by the Navy and by Evans & Sutherland, said Robert Brantly,
a senior program manager at the company. Boeing is the primary subcontractor.
To determine how best to design a deployable trainer, the contractors
talked to load-masters on aircraft carriers and asked them how big
the trainer should be in order to get on the boat. The answer was
8x8x20 feet, Brantly said in an interview. TSTARS is a 4-foot dome
with a 360-degree view.
The trainer, packed in a metal ISO container, can be hung from
below the flight deck, with no modifications required on the carrier,
he said. The TSTARS fits on a C-130 cargo aircraft and can be loaded
on a truck as well.
Today’s Navy flight simulators tend to be 20-foot domes or
40-foot domes, located at naval stations stateside or overseas.
On a carrier, said Brantly, pilots have mission rehearsal stations,
which typically are computer workstations that allow them to view
imagery, but they are not flight simulators. TSTARS would provide
a full mission rehearsal simulator system on the boat for the first
time, he said. Each air wing would get a device that would travel
with them.
Evans & Sutherland expects to compete in a future DTATS program,
which Brantly believes could involve 20-25 deployable trainers.
The estimated cost for each unit is $3 million to $3.5 million.
In March 2000, company executives were invited to bring a TSTARS
device to the Oceana Naval Air Station for a review by the high-level
Navy Air Board. “The admirals thought this was on the right
track,” said Brantly.
TSTARS is reconfigurable, he explained. “You can open up
the end of the van, pull out the cockpit, put in a new one for an
AV-8B Harrier (right now it’s an F/A-18), close the back door
and fly a new disk in, and run it as an AV-8 simulator.” The
changeover takes about a day to complete.
Adaptable Trainers
Another industry player in the business of deployable trainers is
BAE Systems Flight Simulation and Training, in Tampa, Fla.
The company will not decide whether to participate in a future
DTATS program until there is a “real requirement” articulated
by the Navy, said John Lenyo, the company’s vice president
for business.
BAE Systems competed and lost an Army award for a deployable reconfigurable
tactical trainer for helicopters, under a program called AV-CATT.
The winner was Link Simulation and Training, based in Arlington,
Texas.
“We did a prototype for AV-CATT [in 1996],” Lenyo said
in an interview. The Navy program has yet to formalize a requirement,
he said. “They are asking industry about what is feasible
and what is possible.”
The technology is “feasible,” Lenyo said. The company
already has been able to pack three helicopter simulators in a standard
container, about the size of a tractor trailer box.
“Big, full-flight trainers are designed to train everything
from systems to emergency procedures and how to fly the aircraft,”
Lenyo explained. “In a deployable device, you can assume the
guy knows how to fly and knows the emergency procedures.”
What needs to be taught are tactics, he said. “The most difficult
thing to teach is tactics.” When building a tactical trainer,
“you can eliminate things such as the motion system, the simulation
of hydraulics systems, and you focus on high-fidelity simulation
for the tactical environment—immersive visual systems, semi-automated
forces and weapon systems. That is how you make it small and deployable.”
How much to spend on a simulator depends on “training objectives,”
said Lenyo. “There are different training tasks, for which
you need different levels of fidelity in a simulator. If you want
to teach basic flight skills, you need the equivalent of an FAA
level-C simulator. That means you need a motion system, and fidelity
to certain levels.”
Basic flight simulators often include a tactical training capability,
known as a weapon system trainer, he added. “That is typically
the kind of simulators the military has been buying. They cost a
lot of money ($20 million to $30 million) because of the high fidelity
systems.” The downside is that they are “big and bolted
to the floor.”
A pilot deployed at sea can stay proficient for some time, “but
what he can’t practice often enough is tactics,” Lenyo
said. That means being able, in a simulator, to drop bombs and conduct
air-to-air engagements. “The only way they can practice, short
of a live firing exercise, is in the simulator. If you have only
one weapon system trainer and you can’t afford to buy a bunch
of them, then that becomes a training problem.”
The “key technology” that the industry must focus on
today is the development of visual systems, Lenyo said. “Typically,
in a large flight simulator, there are big display systems. To make
it portable, you can’t have a big visual system.”
BAE Systems developed a helmet-mounted display, along with a product
called Gemin-Eye that allows trainees to get a high-resolution visual
image in a very small space. Gemin-Eye is an optical display system
mounted on a helmet.
Lenyo estimated that, depending on options and packaging, deployable
trainers will sell for less than $10 million.
The company predicts a 3 percent to 6 percent growth in Defense
Department simulation and training in the near term, “but
a lot of it has to do with the next administration,” said
Lenyo. The United States spends 60 percent of the world’s
simulation and training budgets. “We expect that to increase
moderately. But the focus on simulation and training in the U.S.
will be moving toward deployable, transportable, tactical trainers
and Web-based distance learning.”
There are problems, however, in the simulation and training industry,
he said, because most firms can’t make deliveries on time.
“This industry always has been constrained by resources. We
need certain skill sets that no other industry in the world needs,
... [workers] who only exist in the simulation field.”
The only way to hire talent is to woo employees from another simulation
firm or grow the workforce in-house, which takes many years to do,
Lenyo said. “Almost every company finds they don’t have
enough talent. Simulators bog down in the development cycle. ...
That is why everyone is late.”
A growth in overcapacity in the industry also has pushed some companies
to make commitments to some “extraordinary expectations of
the customers and then find out the price they are being paid doesn’t
match the customer’s expectations,” said Lenyo.
One senior Navy officer recently confirmed the industry’s
predictions that the needs for simulators will grow.
“We need simulators with debriefing and training capability,
of the same type the commercial airlines have,” Rear Adm.
Frank “Skip” Dirren Jr., commander of the Navy Safety
Center, told the Tailhook Association annual convention last August.
The Navy’s future pilots, he said, “need to train foundational
skills in a simulator. We can’t afford to do that in live
aircraft. We could do it in simulators, if we had the kind of simulators
that the airlines have.” Dirren acknowledged that airline
pilots do not perform nearly as risky flights as naval tactical
aviators. For that reason, Dirren said, commercial pilots don’t
do any training flights in real airplanes. “All the training
flights are in simulators. And it works. [But] I’m not saying
we have to do that.”