Airborne embedded (and LVC) training systems

[Maro.Kyo]

While talking about some current advanced pilot training trends on other threads, I've figured out that there was no dedicated thread for ETS and LVC solutions which are very interesting piece of tech with very important implications, especially as we move into the era of very expensive 5th gen and 6th gen fighters. I've thought of making this a general embedded training solutions thread for all piece of airborne, land and maritime platfroms but that felt a bit too general so I'll stick with something that flies here.

 

[Maro.Kyo]

In summary, ET has been fairly common in various forms since the early cold war in bigger systems like ships or ground stations. This is understandable since the limitations concerning the realization of ET on a certain platform was its computing power and memory size, which for that reason it was fairly late that a smaller mobile platform such as aircraft or land vehicles haven't seen any ET implementations untill quite a bit later since the ICs were invented.

One of the first ETS examples seems to be the OBS (Onboard Simulation) that was implemented on F-15B as part of the IFFC(Integrated Flight/Fire Control) development. OBS was implemented as a software module on the IFFC mission computer and was a BFM/ground gunnery simulator software.

It is interesting in a way that it wasn't only (what seems to be) one of the first sophisticated ET implementation on a plane, but also a very primitive kind of AR technology. So in BFM training mode, OBS had a HUD symbology as below :


What's important here is the target symbology you see there. The target on the hud is not a static symbology but a virtual, moving target. It represents a "delta wing aircraft" and changes size and orientation accordingly depending on where the aircraft is in relation to this virtual target. The target movement is a fixed-memory based movement, and different maneuver sequences are saved on the IFFC memory and could be randomly called up. The pilot needs to try its best to put this "delta wing aircraft" on the reticle and shoot, and the Air Combat Evaluator calculates the expected number of hits and gives a score. Ground gunnery mode works similarly, but with a fixed target.

Although OBS wasn't actually developed as a trainning tool, reports evaluating OBS sees quite some potential of it being used as a training tool if further developed and refined. Also it is quite interesting since after the OBS, some of those ETS that were demonstrated/actually came to use in the early 2000s hadn't had a WVR training mode, citing "technical limitations". I'll come talk about that part later.

Apart from this experimental OBS, there were also some other discussions of implementation of ET on the F-16C during the late 80s. ET had by that point became far more feasible thanks to more wide spread of federated avionics and MFD. That coupled with precision guided stores, it meant that now the focus of simulation was shifting to simulating avionics outputs in real-life situations on the HUD and MFD.

 

[Maro.Kyo]

Since classifying things in generations is fun, I'll define some very crude generation of ETS on my own criteria for the ease of reference. If OBS was a ancestery/generation 0 of ETS, what I would call the 1st gen ETS came about during the late 90s/early 00s. The most notable ETS from this period are the Smits Aerospace-BVR Systems ETS for the F-22 and Fokker/Dutch Space/Airbus D&S Netherlands-NLR E-CATS for F-16 and F-35. I'll get to them sometime later.

 

[Maro.Kyo]

It looks pretty solid, and I wish I’d been through one of these before long.

It surely does, especially for jts time. Though since it took quite long before an ETS with embedded WVR training functionality reappeared, it'd still probably have been quite far from what they could use for regular training syllabus.