Royal Canadian Air Force Sees More Sims In the Future of Fighter Pilot Training

dakohli writes "Currently, Canadian Fighter Pilots spend about 20% of their 'stick' time in Simulators. RCAF General Blondin states that this will rise to 50/50 in the future. The article goes on to state that the U.S. Army is moving in this direction, although the U.S. Air Force is a little more skeptical. Aircraft are expensive to fly, and if the fidelity of a simulator is good enough then perhaps real pilots will spend even less time actually in the air. Slashdotters, do you think that this will actually make recruiting pilots more difficult, or is it a sign of the things to come beyond Military Aviation?"

No, it's really not.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, I'm a military aviator, and I've got plenty of experience in both sims and the actual aircraft.

For some platforms, yes, the sims are just fine. Less dynamic platforms (i.e. helicopters, big wing) work just fine with full motion platforms. It will never be "perfect." Many of the imperfections manifest in ways that are inherent in simplified programming, i.e. actually modeling fluid dynamics for how the jet handles with failed systems vs. just hard coding that things "will" or "wont" work at certain airspeeds.

For tactical aircraft, however, there is absolutely no comparison. Yes, basic flight operations (taking off, landing, navigating) can be done relatively decently, but tactical flying (g-force, sun blind spots, etc) cannot be replicated in anything remotely resembling our current simulators.

Not to mention that most tactical simulators dont include motion. A "full motion" sim can't replicate more than 1.0 G in any given direction, much less a sustained 5g pull. The technology simply doesn't exist.

So do simulators have their uses? Absolutely. But there is no substitute for real flight time, and until we get some Star Trek -esque technology at our disposal, there won't be.

Re:No, it's really not.

[CRC'99]

For the record, I'm a military aviator, and I've got plenty of experience in both sims and the actual aircraft.

For the record, I'm a commercial pilot.

Simulators have their place - but it is certainly nowhere near the experience as a real aircraft. Speaking from a commercial background, simulators are great at two things:
1) Procedure
2) Techniques

Simulators are great in showing pilots how things work. Want to know what to expect in a fogged in approach to an airport and are learning how to use the ILS etc? A simulator is *great* in this role. You can do things in this combo that are GREAT for education. Does it come anywhere close to the real thing? Hell no.

The other thing that simulators excel at is teaching things such as instrument scans - basically train you to keep an eye on all your instruments at the same time by developing an effective scan of them. No pilot flying on instruments will use a single instrument - flying is very complex and cannot be done like this. An effective instrument scan (A/H -> Airspeed -> A/H -> Altitude -> A/H -> VSI -> A/H -> DG etc) is very hard to grasp when first starting - and it is the bread and butter that keeps pilots alive when the weather is starting to deteriorate or you start to fly faster and bigger aircraft.

Your standard 737 pilot will probably spend about 15 minutes out of every flight looking out the windows. The rest is monitoring instrumentation. I cannot understate how important this skill is - and simulators are perfect at developing those skills.

So are simulators replacement for a real aircraft though? Nowhere near. Simulators should be treated as an addition to inflight training - not as a replacement for it.

Re:No, it's really not.

[Solandri]

A previous company I worked at helped create 1278.1 (DIS). And you're correct that it's able to handle massive numbers of simulated entities interacting (easily tens of thousands; I think they managed one sim with over 100,000 entities in the mid-1990s). The crucial difference from the simulated shared environment most of us are familiar with (online games) is that the participants don't cheat. Hacking your client so it doesn't operate as programmed defeats the purpose of running a sim. Whereas in a game it's frequently in the player's best interest to cheat by hacking their client.

So in an online game, all the position, movement, actions, and collisions have to be handled by a centralized server to make it impossible to cheat. With DIS, each client calculates its own interactions and simply multicasts the consequences (e.g. movement changes) to all the other sim participants. e.g. The F-16 sim tells everyone it drops a bomb from its location with this trajectory. The M1A2 tank sim uses that to calculate that it was hit and destroyed, and it tells everyone "I'm dead now."

Since all these calculations are distributed, your computing power scales with the number of participants, unlike an online game where the server computing power is fixed. And the primary limitation on scalability is how much traffic the network can handle (the spec calls for a very minimal packet size, and a lot of work went into decreasing the frequency with which an individual sim needed to multicast updates).

Re:No, it's really not.

[dywolf]

"since the vietnam war"
There also hasnt been a real air war since Vietnam, and yet there's still be a few dogfight incidents.
Missiles fail, missiles can be jammed/countered/evaded. What happens then? More missles? You can only carry so many. Turn and run? Not always tactically viable, and makes you a nice big target.

Sensors can be evaded, thus negating the BVR combat space, letting him get that much closer and taking you by surprise. they can be vectored in on a blind spot (we dont -always- have AWACS radar coverage), they might appear from below you (particularly zoom climb interception profiles, aircraft that were never BVR to start with). hell, that's pretty much the whole concept behind stealth: to negate the other guys detection abilities and get him by surprise. As more and more stealth planes appear, as was bound to happen, it decreases the usefulness of the BVR-only concept, once again pointing out how focusing just on BVR will bite you in the ass.

Point is, you cannot, just CANNOT, tunnelvision on just one tactic. You must remain flexible, you must not leave a backdoor wide open. And that is why to this day we still teach dogfighting tactics, perhaps even moreso than BVR combat training (because it's more complex, and less forgiving).

You cannot build a giant nearly invulnerable death machine, and then ignore the thermal exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor core, even if it is only 2 meters wide.