DEL RIO — Like many budding pilots, Air Force Lt. Luis Leon flew endless missions “in a chair” using a stick and the cardboard display of the T-6A Texan II instrument panel.
Resting on a plastic clothes basket in his dorm room in Laughlin AFB, a suburb of Del Rio, his “cockpit” was a crude, old-fashioned, $10 study.
But it was very effective. It taught Leon the pre-flight checklist.
He invested hundreds of hours to get it right, repeating the second natural step of lowering the flaps, retracting the speed brakes and activating the ejection seat.
This is the system that has been in use in one form or another since France began training American pilots in 1915 to “taxi fly” on aircraft mockups. At first it took him 45 minutes to process over 100 items, but in the end he easily got it done in like 20 minutes.
“At this point, it’s all just so ingrained in you,” he said.
A native of Port Chester, New York, Leon just turned 24 in the fall of 2019, four months into what the Air Force has already called a “legacy” education, a year-long pilot training program.
Student pilots today spend far more time in simulators on the ground than in the air. They work with instructors to determine the pace of learning and practicing basic aviation skills.
At the heart of the change is a heavy reliance on virtual reality simulators (“VR sims”), sometimes called “immersive training devices” or ITDs. Whatever the acronym, they allow some students to get ahead of others in their ability to fly planes on their own.
It took me nearly a year to graduate from flight training. Currently at the Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) hub in Laughlin and Columbus and Vance Air Force Bases in Mississippi and Oklahoma, respectively, he’s less than eight months old.
Students in Pilot Training Next, the experimental Air Force program that pioneered the new system, always had a Sim in their apartment who could “fly.” Students today cannot take them home. They have immediate access to devices at the Squadron’s offices at three of his UPT bases, and at Joint Base San Antonio Randolph, which produces new instructors.
The simulator is so close to the real thing that anyone can land on the ground, much more realistic than flying in a chair. But chair flying won’t go away.
“Never,” said Maj. John “Atari” Pearce, 34, Randolph’s instructor pilot.
Students sit in chairs from the simulator and come back to learn the drills “before they get on the plane and spend some time on the fuel and the engine live,” says another instructor, Kelly “Coach” Van Gundy. Major, 43, said. .
“The chair flying still has to happen because it’s where you build what you want to do, build your expectations, and mentally build your habit patterns,” he said. , is a mission rehearsal…a practice of doing these habit patterns and seeing if they work.”
Even after the Aviation Education and Training Command fully adopted the lessons and framework of the Pilot Training Next experiment on November 1, a more flexible syllabus and a “coach-athlete” teaching approach that relied heavily on simulators remained. Adopted. By grabbing a broom stick or toilet plunger.
This is how Lieutenant Ricky Arrocho learned the basics of flying despite attending Pilot Training Next in 2019. He made a solo flight at the age of 22 on his sixth flight in a T-6A. This was much less time than traditional training.
“Being a pilot is not necessarily about flying well,” explains Arocho of Aquadillo, Puerto Rico. It’s important to interpret the data as quickly as possible.”
“Virtual” Instructor
The simulators used by many novice pilots include a “virtual instructor” who can correct and critique them.
PTN students used a computer-driven simulation called VIPER (Virtual Instructor Pilot Exercise Referee), introduced at the Air Force Academy in 2018. VIPER is currently only available in Laughlin, but AETC spokeswoman Marilyn Holliday said it will eventually be used at all. pilot training base.
Todd Griffith, president and chief technology officer of Discovery Machine Inc., which developed the system, said VIPER helps students hone loops, formation flying, and other basic skills, but human instructors can’t. It states that it can never replace the nuances it provides.
“The goal, of course, is to give people more freedom to train when they want to and when they want to,” he said.
AETC agrees that the experience of “actually flying” cannot be replaced by a machine, but the sim “provides basic concepts relatively quickly and provides an initial level of knowledge, skill, and aptitude.” is important for increasing the statement.
Both instructors and students have a phrase for the learning process: “Sim learn, fly and check.”
Novice pilots can sit in front of an ITD screen, hold hands, roll down the runway, and soar quickly into the air. Under your control, you can stop and resume the simulation at will, and use landmarks to display around Randolph and other bases. as a reference point.
The latest sim used by Randolph’s 559th Flying Training Squadron is a significant improvement over the previous version used by Pilot Training Next students three to four years ago. A student at Pilot Training Next, he had to take a break every 15 minutes due to the limited visual resolution of the headset.
Now the pilot can “fly” three times longer before coming to a stop.
Ates Bulent Sencalar, IT manager for Randolph’s 12th Operations Group, said: “Three-and-a-half years ago, the headset wasn’t that good and the refresh rate wasn’t that great, so I had a lot of motion sickness with my old headset.”
How much do those headsets cost? From $399 to $5,000.
touch and go
Earlier this month, Sencalar, 55, helped Captain Collin Fleck settle into ITD so he could fly a virtual T-6A into the skies around Randolph.
Fleck, who is learning to be an instructor pilot, must teach future students how to use the Sims. Part of that job included tracking a syllabus that required novices to fly local patterns while in contact with other military aircraft at some point, and which aircraft had priority and which aircraft needed to yield to it. teaches the importance of whether there is .
ITD can place students over various air force bases in all types of weather conditions.
Wearing VR goggles and facing the screen. Fleck took hold of the control stick and rolled down his one of Randolph’s two runways, picking up speed and clearing the pavement before turning right and banking in the same direction. Thousands of feet below were trees, parking lots, and buildings, with blue skies above.
A minute later he glanced to the right, took the plane to another bank, and straightened again. Every time Fleck moved his head to the right, the screen moved in the same direction.
C-130J Hercules captain Fleck, 30, has a virtual T-6,
historic basehe didn’t feel what pilots call the “stick force” of flight, the traction of gravity.
After all, he was in a building on the east side of Randolph.
Fleck crossed Loop 1604, briefly landing on the runway just before closing the final approach on FM 78, and took off again. He had other references — Interstate 35, several large buildings and businesses, and water towers, including Randolph’s.
famous taj mahal.
Randolph used ITD for the first time. But Fleck’s flight was smooth. The touch and go lasted about 30 minutes.
A San Antonio Express News photographer with a private pilot’s license did much worse when he was allowed to fly the Sim. He crashes the virtual plane trying to land it.
“Admittedly, this is not a 100% substitute for the real thing, but when you combine the experience of the plane itself with what is depicted in the VR simulator, you can fuse the two and build a knowledge base. says Fleck. , added that the experience was realistic: “a step above the existing simulators we have across the Air Force”.
A sim like this would have helped him when he was learning to fly, he said. Please practice whenever you have.
“When I took flight training, we only did chair flight. I’m trying to simulate it in my head..
At the time, he sat on his tires with a broomstick in hand and taped the cockpit display to the wall in front of him.
“How much better can a virtual reality simulator be than sitting on a wheel with a broomstick? Exponentially better,” Fleck said.
“How do you think?”
In Air Force training, if a novice pilot misses even one checklist item, the penalties are severe and they automatically fail. But in real life the cost can be higher.
About 12 miles from Laughlin in 2017, a simple verbal distraction interrupted a preflight check and killed a veteran instructor pilot.
Forgot to equip the ejection seat
A T-38 jet trainer crashed and could not be rescued.
Simulators can’t give you mental discipline, but they can help students develop important skills.
“There are two different veins. One is as a part-task trainer, which is, ‘You have to practice sharp turns, you have to perfect sharp turns,’ which is one of the old school ideas.” One,” said Lieutenant Tom Jacobs. His AETC instructor his pilot who flew solo on his seventh flight as part of the first cohort of Pilot Training Next, known as Version 1.
Another is mission rehearsal. “I’m going to practice this whole flight over and over,” Jacobs said. “And students are free to do whatever they want in a criticized environment.”
Last year, before retiring as commander of the 19th Air Force, Maj. Gen. Craig Wills predicted that the simulator’s artificial intelligence would one day be able to share these criticisms with its instructors.
“Imagine you’re the instructor for that scenario and you get an email or prompt from a learning management system that says, ‘Hey, you’re going to fly with Craig Wills tomorrow,'” Wills said. “These are three issues he has. Here’s what we recommend. Click here to see if he’s really practiced.”
The simulators used in the old “Legacy” training were expensive, housed in dark cavernous rooms and operated by private experts.
They have a history that goes back generations to the Depression-era machines that helped train World War II pilots. It was developed by Edwin his Albert his link in 1929, based on a patent held by San Antonio native Carl Crane, known as “the father of his simulator of flight”.
But the most basic simulator has always been chair flying. It was a strict tradition in the Army Air Corps, but “it certainly paid off in developing a second nature approach to flight safety and procedures,” said AETC historian Gary Boyd.
Air Force apprentices have flown the aerobatic T-6A for over 20 years. In the cockpit he has three consoles, and Leon taught himself to navigate the pre-flight checklist from left to right while practicing on cardboard displays.
Only then could he “start” the engine.
“There are technical skills in flying, but in the end it’s all about how well you think about it,” Wills said.
“Because when you see how we fight, when you see things that go wrong on planes, when you see complex situations that people expect to be resolved, pretty much everything is resolved between your ears. That’s because before you settle with sticks and ladders.”
sigc@express-news.net
