Special ops aviators press industry to improve trainers.

The U.S. Army special operations aviators, the Night Stalkers, typically choose training devices that give them the ability to rehearse missions at the drop of the hat, industry officials say.

That is the reason why training systems contractors said their challenge is to develop systems and databases that not only offer high-quality performance and fidelity, but that also can be easily updated.

"They push us constantly," said David Graham, director of special operations forces programs at CAE USA. "We agree on what we can do today, and they ask us to make sure we have created an architecture for improving that, because as soon as a slightly better technology comes along or a slightly better capability or improvement in fidelity, this customer tends to want it."

The customer--the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment--is all over the world, he said. Whether they are at war or not, pilots always are involved in operations and want to be able to train while deployed.

Using government databases and digital maps, contractors develop "common synthetic environments" that replicate geographic areas of the world.

"It is an easy thing to talk about, but a hard thing to do in our business," Graham said. "We tend to [view] each system as its own collection of data. If you make a change, then all systems have to be correlated. The problem is that it takes time.... Somebody has to manually find all correlation errors and correct them."

CAE is the prime contractor for the Army Special Operations Forces Aviation and Rehearsal Systems (ASTARS). The company is under contract for an AH/MH-6 (Little Bird) light assault/attack re-configurable combat mission simulator. The program is estimated at about $50 million.

The company also received a contract to provide desktop and part-task trainers for the MH-47G Chinook and the MH-60K Black Hawk helicopters. That contract is worth $5 million.

At press time, CAE was still negotiating another contract for an MH-47G and MH-60K combat mission simulator. This work is expected to run about $85 million.

"The negotiation is primarily to finalize the requirement jointly," said Graham. "Instead of the traditional approach, where the customer throws a requirement over the wall and we respond to it and throw our answer over the wall, once we were selected, we have been finalizing the requirements jointly with the customer."

The upcoming delivery of new aircraft--the MH-47G and the MH-60K--to the Special Operations Aviation Regiment prompted the need for new simulators, said Graham.

SOAR aviators have unique requirements, he complained, such as a new glass cockpit and avionics layout that is common between their helicopters. "You have a Chinook that at the first glance, if you look at the cockpit layout at the front, looks like a Black Hawk."

Rockwell Collins is the maker of the cockpit.

"The biggest challenge we are addressing with the new technology is that we are making the process of creating synthetic databases for mission rehearsal faster and more accurate," he said.

SOF training devices demand high reliability, availability and maintainability, Graham said.

"If you are just using a simulator for a training requirement, and you have a problem with a simulator, it is relatively straight-forward [that you can] postpone the training sessions," he said. "These [SOAR] simulators rehearse a real-world mission, and you can't postpone it. So the reliability of the simulator becomes a very big issue."

SOF is an "incredibly" advanced user of simulation, said Graham. "They challenge the technology. They fly their simulators more aggressively."

The mission rehearsal has to be highly realistic, Graham said. "There is an incessant demand for the highest fidelity simulation, the highest fidelity outside-the-window view, the highest fidelity radar and infrared."

SOAR aviators fly mostly at night, so simulation devices have to work with night vision goggles. "That drives everything in the simulation to be designed from the ground up to support the night environment," Graham said.

Because the pilots will wear their actual night vision goggles during training, everything in the simulation has to look just like the helicopters' panels would look through the night vision sensors.

"There is a fair amount of work to make the outside of the window view to be representative of the NVG environments," he said. "You have to get rid of all the stray sources of light. You have to do a lot of things to make sure there isn't some artificial source of light in the simulation that would not be in the aircraft."

A lot of work is put into painting certain parts of the simulators black and hanging down curtains to keep out extraneous light sources.

SOAR pilots also have stringent field-of-view requirements, which are not always easy to satisfy, experts say.

"These guys fly with their head out and look down at a fast rope and they want to be able to do all of that in simulation," Graham said.

For example, pilots fly the Little Bird with its doors off, and they "keep sticking their heads out," said Graham. Unless the simulations are realistic, "this customer can't accept it," he added.

The devices that CAE is developing for the Little Bird, the Chinook and the Black Hawk all have requirements to be on motion and vibration platforms. They must have comprehensive outside the window visual systems. All simulate the weapons and sensors that these new advanced special ops aircraft will have.

"On top of all that, they we designed from the ground up for mission rehearsal," Graham said. "They are designed from the beginning to be interoperable with each other, and they are designed to be interoperable with the rest of the special ops command. They [also] are designed to be interoperable with the rest of the defense simulation community."

Because the Little Bird simulator was developed before the two new combat mission simulators for the MH-47 and the MH-60, it does not have the more advanced synthetic environment required for the new simulators.

"At the time that we negotiated the Little Bird, we had not contemplated this new synthetic environment," said Graham. Once the new synthetic environment starts working in the new simulators, the Little Bird also is going to be retrofitted with it. "Right now, it uses a legacy system for its mission preview/mission rehearsal synthetic environment," Graham noted.

The hardware architecture, the software framework and the computer-generated forces are common across all the simulators, he said. The Little Bird simulator comes in a dome, while the other two do not.

"The Little Bird is a very small helicopter, like a sports car, and the two pilots sit very close to each other," said Graham. "Because they are so close together horizontally, we can use a real image, so they have an actual dome image all the way around them that has a very high field of view."

If the pilots sit farther apart from each other--as is the case in bigger helicopters--they would see images from a totally different angle. "A doorknob we can model [for example], but if it is something that is supposed to be out there in the distance, then you have errors, and it shows up in the weapons and in the flight," said Graham.

For these simulators, CAE uses a collimated display, he explained, which is a way of using a mirror and a projection screen to make the rays appear to be parallel from a fixed source. "Obviously, there is a protector out there that is not 5 miles away, but the collimated optics allow those distance objects to appear to be out at infinity," he said. "That makes the sighting in the weapons correct." However, collimated optics limit how much field of view can be displayed, he said.

"The tradeoff by going to collimated displays is that we can't cover as much field of view," he added.

Besides pilot training, there is some discussion about increasing the capability to include training for the crew, Graham said. "The customer has a future requirement for an aircrew training and mission rehearsal capability, that will train the door gunners and the load masters, and the people monitoring the hoists on the Chinook."