Air Force pilots are not receiving enough high-quality training,
largely because some flight simulators lack the sophistication needed
to practice realistic warfare missions, said the chief of the Air
Combat Command.
Gen. Hal M. Hornburg, USAF, recently told National Defense that
the service plans to conduct a “four-star-level simulation
summit” to address shortfalls in simulation-based training.
“We call it a summit, because four stars don’t get together
for things like this too often,” he said. “It is important
to address simulation wall-to-wall in the Air Force, to make sure
that our simulation is as good as it can be, is as good as we can
afford, and that it complements what we do and enhances our training.”
During the past decade, said Hornburg, the Air Force has not focused
enough attention on advancing simulation technologies. Before taking
over as ACC chief, Hornburg was head of the Air Education and Training
Command.
“I have to profess a mild degree of disappointment with the
Air Force for where we have gone,” he said. “I have
seen a simulation atrophy.” During the 2001 Interservice Industry
Training Simulation and Education Conference, in Orlando, Fla.,
Hornburg said that his greatest concern is that the skills of the
airmen currently fighting in Afghanistan are wearing out. “These
kids here, who have to go and replace the ones overseas, need the
simulators to train as new pilots,” he said.
“We have to train for the toughest situation,” Hornburg
stressed. “We should never take training for granted—we
forget that training is a privileged commodity and also expensive.”
However, Hornburg cautioned that simulation should not be used
to replace, but rather to enhance live flight training.
Among the most ambitious simulation-based training programs that
the Air Force adopted is the so-called Distributed Mission Training
(DMT). The project was the brainchild of Air Force Gen. Richard
Hawley, former ACC commander. The DMT program has been in the works
for five years. The goal is to allow pilots loca-ted at various
locations to train collectively using different types of simulator
platforms, so they can interoperate in a joint environment.
The first step of the DMT program has been to integrate the four
F-15 simulators at Langley Air Force Base, Va. and four at Eglin
Air Force Base, in Fla. The F-15s will interoperate with an AWACS
simulator at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. AWACS is the Air Force
air-traffic control platform.
“Technically, DMT is a challenging integration job, which
requires a combi-nation of a big picture architectural approach,
as well as extraordinary attention to the finest details,”
said Mike Papay, DMT program manager at TRW Inc. The company is
responsible for the program’s system integration work.
“One of the challenges we are finding in DMT is squeezing
in integration and test time with the operational training time
at the DMT sites,” he said. “The simulators are very
impressive systems, and training time is highly sought after by
the wing personnel. This makes system upgrades and enhancements
difficult to schedule.”
The technology in DMT will enable Air Force combat units to conduct
large campaign exercises without leaving their home base, noted
retired Navy Rear Adm. Fred Lewis, executive director of the National
Training Systems Association. “One of the complaints of the
pilots was that they were on the road all the time,” Lewis
said.
One element that has been lacking in Air Force training is combat
search and rescue, said Air Force Lt. Gen. Donald Lamontagne, commander
of the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base. “We could
not pull together a combat rescue, because the forces are always
deployed and it is hard to pull the pieces together,” he told
the IITSEC conference. “DMT gives you the opportunity to pull
all these together, and we need to be able to rehearse this kind
of mission with every service.”
The challenge in bringing DMT to fruition has not been the technology
but rather the lack of funding, noted Hornburg. The Air Force must
work to ensure that there is an “adequate amount of money
to keep it on track,” Hornburg said. For fiscal year 2002,
the Air Force requested $74.5 million for DMT. This includes funding
to cover the F-15, F-16 and AWACS simulators, as well as operational
and integration costs.
Hornburg explained that budgets decreased significantly during
the 1990s and the Air Force had to make “tough choices”
with regard to buying new equipment. “DMT was something that
there was not much money for,” he said.
“Sometimes, we let our simulators lag by a few modifications,
so they don’t exactly feel to the aircrew as the airplane
does,” said Hornburg. “The technology and, in time,
the concurrency in keeping them up-to-date is really what I would
like to get at if it is affordable.
“We need to look at our simulators as we look at our aircraft
modernization,” Hornburg said. “We need to have millions
and millions of dollars invested in an airplane, so I think investing
a few million dollars in having a simulator that will enhance flight
training makes good sense.”
F-16 Simulators
Even though simulators are much more advanced than they used to
be, Hornburg said, “you get what you pay for.” Among
the simulators that are not up to standards are the F-16 trainers,
he said. “I don’t believe that our simulation in the
F-16 is all that it needs to be, because we invested in some simulation
that I don’t believe gives the aircrews as much motion and
feeling of a real flight as I would like them to have.”
He said that the Air Force chose a low-cost solution, thus sacrificing
performance. “This is a good little trainer, but it is not
the high-fidelity trainer that I am looking for,” Hornburg
said. “I just want our simulators, if we can afford it, to
be as high fidelity as they can.”
The Air Force already has spent $176 million on the F-16 DMT system,
which will replace existing F-16 simulators. The first four trainers
will be delivered to Shaw Air Force base, S.C., in April. Another
device will be installed at Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho, in August.
Lockheed Martin Corp., in Akron, Ohio, is under contract to build
the mission training centers, said Richard Roop, the company’s
simulation and training business director. Once the trainers are
onsite and certified, the Air Force will rent them by the hour,
rather than own them.
“It’s like a utility company—we go build the
infrastructure, put it in place, we provide the devices, and then
the government pays us at an hourly rate, like a fee per service,”
explained Roop.
Hornburg had an opportunity to see the F-16 DMT trainer during
the IITSEC exhibition. “It looked to me like a quantum leap
from what we have right now,” he said. “We are going
to take a look and see if whether we want to make any improvements
on them or not.”
The system has not been developed as quickly as he would have wanted,
Hornburg said. “You get what you pay for, and I think we did
not have the money to bring the F-16 on as fast as we wanted to,”
Hornburg said. “I am sure the producer was ready to go. I
don’t think there are any big technical snafus. There certainly
will be some, and as we learn how to use the system, we are going
to refine our requirements over time.”
To replicate the real aircraft, Lockheed Martin has combined a
high-fidelity cockpit with F-16 flight dynamics that reproduce the
feel, operation activation, aircraft handling characteristics and
aerodynamic flight performance, said Cary Dell, a company spokesman.
A 360-degree visual system provides geo-specific topographic data.
A synthetic environment will include atmospherics, radio navigation
and up to several hundred aircraft and surface entities, to engage
the pilots in the training mission.
“The F-16 mission training center is allowing a central location
where aircrews can come in and practice as two-ship, three-ship
or four-ship and go in and actually practice those kinds of missions,
and interact with each other,” said Roop. The system can be
networked to other F-16 simulators either by distributive interactive
simulation or high-level architecture.
Among the critical components of the trainer are peripheral devices,
said Roop. “Another guy can go in and fly as a role-player
against a four-ship, for example, and fly like a threat,”
said Roop. “He can actually go fly combat missions against
the guys to check their skills and their tactics.”
In the operator center, the instructors can select a mission with
a point-and-click capability. “They have the capability of
capturing [the mission] and replaying it, and that is either through
the IOS or through a larger scale system, called the brief/debrief
station,” said Roop.
Pilots and instructors can get a detailed mission preview and reconstruction
capability in the trainer’s brief/debrief facility. The facility
supports pre-mission fly-through of events. “You can capture
all the same environment activities, switch positions and actions
that the pilots take in real time,” Roop explained.
Including all the peripheral packages, the brief/debrief station,
the role players and the threat stations, the F-16 mission training
center is quite an expensive package, said Roop. The Cadillac version,
as he calls it, ranges in cost from $20 million to $30 million per
center. The basic simulator can start at $5 million and go up to
about $40 million, depending on how complex the system is, according
to Roop.
Lockheed Martin’s contract for the F-16 mission training
center ensures the concurrency of the simulator with the actual
aircraft, he said. “We also have what we call a rapid prototype
system,” said Roop. “That allows us to go and actually
check those out before we insert them in the simulators.”
Industry officials are still concerned, however, that the Air Force
does not have enough facilities equipped to house the DMT trainers.
Hornburg said that he did not expect that to be a problem. “We
may have to make some modifications, but we don’t have to
enter a military building process for this,” he said.
Hornburg emphasized that the Air Force needs to find the money
to purchase and maintain the simulators, in order to prevent future
shortfalls in training. “As we fly the JSF [Joint Strike Fighter]
and the F-22, we are not going to have any two-seat training models,
so the first time someone goes up and flies the airplane, they are
going to be by themselves,” said Hornburg. “The way
they are going to get ready to fly is in a simulator.”
The Defense Department plans to unveil a plan on how to improve
training, said Paul Mayberry, the Pentagon’s director for
personnel and readiness. The new strategy is due to be released
in March, Mayberry said at the IITSEC conference. While the buzzword
is transformation for the services, “you hear very little
about training transformation,” Mayberry said.