Commander fears 'Simulation Atrophy': Distributed Mission Training moving 'technologically in right direction'.

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. Homburg, 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 located 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 combination 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 Lr. 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-185, 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-l6 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 rake a look and see if whether we want to make any improvements on them or not."

The system has nor 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 o," 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.

RELATED ARTICLE: Joint Strike Fighter Training Center Scheduled for 2008

Technologies from existing flight simulators, such as the Air Force F-16 and the Navy F/A-18 trainers, will be incorporated in a future training suite for the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter, known as the F-35.

The F-35 prime contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., is looking at all available technologies before it decides how to develop the JSF trainer, said JoAnn Puglisi, the company's director of the JSF trainer program. "In the first couple of years, we are going to do a very thorough honesty analysis," said Puglisi.

Lockheed is developing three versions of the JSF, for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and the United Kingdom.

The overall training system, including upgrades, is expected to generate up to $750 million in contracts through 2012. The first aircraft are scheduled for production by 2008. "We proposed to have a late-to-lead date," said Puglisi during a briefing to reporters. "We backed up from the airplane arrival date and looked back in a three and a half year time frame."

During the next several years, she said, "We are going to be involving industry in building the courseware, building that final suite of trainers and we are backing it up from the due date, because we want the maturity of the airplane to be there," explained Puglisi.

Lockheed's strategy, she said, is to "take advantage of technology, computer systems, flight systems and course systems." The development of courseware is expected to begin in 2004. "With the first airplane arrival in 2008 that is when we are going to have the training system ready," said Puglisi.

The JSF system will include both pilot and maintenance trainers. "We felt that it is much more affordable to do it by product, because nowadays products for maintenance training and pilot training begin to merge," said Puglisi. "We proposed a product across the top to get the affordability and then the differentiation in the uniqueness in the pilot and maintenance devices, pilot courseware and maintenance courseware."

As far as the courseware is concerned, said Puglisi, "it'll all be database-driven, because we have the diversity, we are not going to build three different courseware systems. We are trying to have as much commonality as possible and also with the pilots and maintainers."

The JSF training program will follow a new approach that Puglisi coined autonomic logistics. "It is something that is done without thought or human intervention, like your breathing system," she explained. "Everything is going to be electronically connected throughout the whole program, so that data is set in one place and can be tracked without human intervention checking all the time.

"With autonomic systems, we communicate the training systems requirements, web-based training, passing information, passing a major faction form and download it into the system," Puglisi noted. "It is a very information-oriented type of concept."

Puglisi noted that a portion of the JSF trainer work will be outsourced to firms other than Lockheed Martin.

Roxana Tiron