Vanguard Magazine

TRAINING T pilots could practice the mission, and get it right, well before their aircraft's wheels ever left the ground. The future is networked "Today, most forces use simulation to pre- pare their pilots." Pietro D'Ulisse, CAE's vice president and business leader for Canada, is on the phone explaining where the company believes sim- ulation is headed in the next few years. In terms of the already impressive imag- Photos: CAE gy" as Bush calls it – using simulation soft- ware developed by CAE. This familiarizes them with the aircraft's components and proper procedures. From there, aspirant pilots move on to the CAE Simfinity Inte- grated Procedures Trainer (IPT), a touch- activated simulator, that apes the set-up of the CC-130J's cockpit. Brush your hand along one of the touch activated screens, and you push the throttles forward, brush another, and you raise the landing gear. Trainees absorb the actual placement of the controls within the aircraft. The final stages of their time at the AMTC finds the pilots working with the Tactical Flight Training Device (TFTD) before moving onto the aforementioned CC-130J Weapons Systems Training Sim- ulators. A fixed-base, static installation, en- tering the TFTD feels precisely like step- ping into the cockpit of a CC-130J. "Right now," says Bush, indicating the view visible through the cockpit windows, "we've got this one sitting on the button in Trenton. We're on the west side facing east and it's sort of mid-dayish." The simula- tion matches, perhaps exceeds, the quality of any high-quality computer game. The interior of the simulator's nose, just outside those cockpit windows, is covered in Mylar. Instructors seated at terminals behind the pilot and co-pilot seats in the simulator can project pretty well anything onto this. The Weapons Systems Training Simulators take the illusion even further, moving precisely like a CC-130J in take- off, flight and landing. "An hour in this," says Bush, "is equivalent to an hour in flight." Simulation on so extensive a level offers the RCAF two advantages. One, very sim- ply is cost saving. The cost of an hour aloft training in a Hercules runs to several thou- sands of dollars. Says Bush: "What you're going to save in fuel costs, in maintenance costs, in O and M [operations and maneu- ver] costs, in personnel costs, and in car- bon footprint is going to be huge." But if the experience is "simulated," it is not inauthentic – the air force's current ideal, says Bush, is "train how you fight, fight how you train." The experience of working on the weapons systems train- ing simulators has been created to exactly mimic the real thing: there will be no dis- connect between what you've learned and what you need to do. More, the simulators can take pilots where real-life experience has not – yet. "If the political climate in any country in the world changes, and we don't normally fly into there? Then probably in three weeks we'll have their airport. We can practice flying in and out before we actually get there." New imagery, for example satellite pictures, can be loaded into the simulators' databases quickly and modified to serve as a teaching tool. If a mission called for a night flight into, to use the above example, Kinshasa, to evacuate civilian casualties, ery, says D'Ulisse, "in a year or two you'll notice differences – you'll see incremental improvements. The technology will con- tinue to improve." But that's not where the profound changes will occur. "Simu- lation system networking," says D'Ulisse, "that's where we're heading. Take a mission where the C-130 is es- corted by a CF-18s. The ideal will be to network two or more simulators to allow the pilots to train together, whether, as he puts it, "the simulators are next door or 1,000 kilometres apart." The future can already be glimpsed at Trenton, where the simulators can be networked together in various training scenarios. For example, the CC-130J TFTD can be networked with the fuselage trainer used for training loadmaster crews in another part of the building. This lets trainee pilots and load- masters learn to work together, just as they would when operating the Hercules on an actual mission. Ultimately, says D'Ulisse, networking will expand to involve not just two simula- tors, but many, on land, air and sea – and from different nations. "Coalition training today with real assets is very expensive," he says. "As simula- tion gets better, you can download train- ing from those assets into virtual environ- ments – saving money and saving the real environment, and importantly, better pre- paring our forces for mission success." What CAE has developed for Trenton points ultimately to training exercises in- volving armed forces worldwide, train- ing together in a simulated battle space. Armed forces that have never worked to- gether before, utlilizing assets that have never been used together before, either. Better, ultimately, than real. www.vanguardcanada.com OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2012 21

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