Mogadishu hero says army aviators need more training.

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 nor 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 cute-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 nor 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 nor 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."

RELATED ARTICLE: Navy Seeks to Improve Periscope-Operator Skills

The Navy is upgrading its training program for submarine periscope operators, hoping to avoid accidents such as the 2001 USS Greenville collision with a Japanese fishing trawler.

Even though the Navy had a training program in place before that incident, officials are seeking to improve the training that periscope operators receive before they deploy on U.S. submarines.

One system being used is called the submarine tactical visual training system. The STVTS is part of a complex submarine multi-mission team trainer.

NLX Corp., of Sterling, Va., is working under a $5.1 million contract with the U.S. Navy to design, manufacture and upgrade the STVTS.

The contract for its umbrella program, the submarine multi-mission team trainer (SMMTT), was awarded to Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems, in Manassas, Va., which is responsible for upgrade kits and associated software under the Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off-The-Shelf Insertion (ARCI) program. ARCI is a sonar system upgrade installed on U.S. Navy attack boats and nuclear-missile boomers.

The SMMTT is the team trainer that simulates the ARCI shipboard environment. Lockheed is expected to complete the work by August 2003. Lockheed's contract was only for Phase I and II of the program, a company spokesman said.

NLX will integrate the STVTS device--a periscope trainer--with the SMMTT over a "high-level architecture interface," according Bob Wuestner, NLX's vice president for business development. The company will provide new tactical controls and displays that have a 360-degree field-of-view during periscope operations. The company is also scheduled to provide updated instructor-operator stations.

After the USS Greenville accident, Wuestner said, the Navy began to emphasize the need for 360-degree surveillance, "to do a visual clearing to make sure if there is something in the immediate area, just as a precaution measure," he said.

The trainer provides submariners with a three-dimensional dynamic sea-state model that can simulate everything from calm seas to raging storms. It is just as important for submariners to experience the different effects the environment can have on their missions, as it is for aviators, Wuestner said.

"The periscope will raise out of the floor," he explained, and the three-dimensional sea-state model will give them the same feel as they would have when looking through an actual periscope.

The STVTS can create an "environment that may be worse than you will ever see," said Wuestner. The trainer also has an image generator for day and night scenarios, in order to "train the submariners in vision recognition capabilities," he added, "Being able to identify targets at night is a challenge!" The simulator will generate contacts and targets that the students will have to identify.

The specific scenarios come from databases that feature coast-line recognition, open-ocean and harbor recognition items.

The STVTS is not what is known as an "immersive training device," he cautioned, because it is on a fixed floor and does not have any form of motion. "But once you look out of the periscope you will have the sensation of the sea state," he said.--

Roxana Tiron ND