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home > April 21, 2008 issue > article
A virtual plane for Navy techs
By David Perera
Special to Defense Systems
In the past, there was just one way for a Navy petty officer
to get his chops troubleshooting a Navy aircraft: getting his hands into
the guts of a parked fighter jet. That jet might have been a stricken airplane
set aside for training or perhaps it would a real live fighter plane.
Either way — despite all the learning that preceded a first contact — it
was an expensive lifestyle.
Recently, the Navy found a better way: Do maintenance training on
a simulator the same way it approaches aviator training.
The goal is to create a computer program so sophisticated that the
training exactly resembles working with a real jet, said Mark St.
Moritz, vice president at American Systems, an information technology
services firm. Using a touch screen, high-end graphics and a relational
database of information about real aircraft systems, the maintenance
simulator would allow trainees the same life-like freedom of
movement that an aviator enjoys in a flight simulator.
The Navy commissioned American Systems to develop eight such
simulators for F/A-18C maintenance training at a cost of $12.9 million
in 2003. The service began deploying the systems in late 2006.
“It’s like getting a video game on the PlayStation 3 now — you actually
feel like you’re in the car driving down the highway,” said David
James, a Navy aviation electronic technician and instructor.
Because a database powers the simulator, trainees are free to
behave as they would in real life — they’re not following a preprogrammed
sequence of events. “Many times students have said the simulator
is broken, but the simulator isn’t broken,” St. Moritz said. “It’s
behaving as a real jet would.”
Expect military services to rely on virtual training more, said Col.
Craig Langhauser, project manager of the Army Program Executive
Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation’s combined arms
tactical trainers program. Training with live equipment is increasingly
too costly in a time of high war expenses and trimmed budgets.
Also, an emerging generation of recruits expects virtual simulations.
Virtual worlds “are in the home, on their Xboxes, they’re in their
PlayStations,” Langhauser said. So-called digital natives want to cruise
through a high-fidelity pixel landscape, learning as they go.
Digital immigrants — anybody with first-hand experience with
typewriters — are a little less keen on virtual simulators. American
Systems included a physical copy of an FA-18C cockpit at the insistence
of the Navy, which also has senior enlisted personnel to think
about. “The guys who came up through the years ... think you have
to get in there and bust your knuckle” for the training to be genuine,
St. Moritz said.
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