Royal Canadian Air Force Sees More Sims In the Future of Fighter Pilot Training 125
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?"
Flight Sim Tech Here (Score:5, Interesting)
The fidelity is already there. Flight time in the sim is nearly as good as the real thing, especially considering when you are up on a motion platform.
The sims are great for procedure training since you can simulate failures which would be expensive or impossible to simulate in a real aircraft. More sim time = less cash spent on keeping the real aircraft in the air but with the same amount (or more) experience for the pilot being retained.
Re:No, it's really not. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and I forgot to include this link in my response above...
Simulator training flaws tied to airline crashes:
http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/2010-08-31-1Acockpits31_ST_N.htm [usatoday.com]
Re:No, it's really not. (Score:4, Interesting)
\Not true. IEEE 1278.1-1998 DIS has been out for a long time (first version of the spec in 1993). It is designed to have massive numbers of interacting agents. Even on a Pentium II you could get a thousand clients connecting. How do I know this? I'm currently writing a multi-threaded cross-platform modern jet combat simulator (using Java 7+OpenGL/JOGL+OpenAL+JInput+OpenDIS, if you must know) and having a lot of clients and CGF (Computer Generated Forces) is well within the capabilities of one of the 8-core AMD CPUs you can get. The performance of OpenGL and modern multi-threaded Java is outstanding (compared to the existing single-threaded C++ jet combat simulations currently on the civilian market; the DCS series and Falcon BMS).
My understand is that many military aircraft these days (and certainly the simulators) have hardware support for IEEE 1278.1 so pilots can learn to operate cockpit in a massively networked environment. Hence, it appears your post is speculation rather - because the military have been able to have extensive simulated engagements for a long time - although a particularly royal air force was interested in the characteristics of the 80-player (40 a side) battles we were able to host in the Eagle Dynamics Flaming Cliffs 2 simulator.
Re:No, it's really not. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're looking out the window for your enemy in a modern air combat situation, you're either about to die or lots of people screwed up in lots of ways.
Nobody has given much thought to non-BVR air combat in about 10 years and for good reason. First sight, first shot, first kill. That's the whole idea of stealth and advanced detection systems for fighters: I'm harder to see, so I see you first, so I shoot first, so I go home minus one long range missile. That's why a $140 Million F-22 makes more sense than three $40 Million Eurofighters. Once the fight is over, nobody got within 40 miles of an enemy and all you have to tally up is the cost of three planes and three trained fighter pilots versus the cost of three missiles and some gas.