DEFENCE DARREN OLIVIER
For almost as long as there have been military aircraft, there have been simulators to assist with the training of pilots, gunners, bombardiers, and other aircrew.
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NLY A YEAR SEPARATED the introduction of the first military aircraft - a modified Wright Model A in 1909 - and the first simulator in 1910: the ‘Tonneau Antoinette’ (Antoinette barrel) was a simple controls demonstrator and 2-axis motion simulator. Within two years it was followed by a wide range of motion and controls simulators, including the Wright Brothers’ ‘Kiwi Bird’ in 1911. After all, flying is still a difficult skill to master even with modern aircraft, let alone the underpowered, rickety, low-endurance, flimsy, and unforgiving contraptions of the pioneering aviation days. It didn’t take long for military forces to realise that if they were going to train up cohorts of airmen, then they needed a way to do the initial parts of it more safely and cheaply on the ground before sending any up in actual aircraft. In all the years since, that principle has remained, with simulators being a central component of all military aircrew training. By the First World War they had been extended to provide training to other roles such as aerial gunners, who used elaborate ground rigs to learn how to lead their fire onto moving aircraft. By the Second World War the primary simulator on the Allied side was
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FlightCom: September 2021
the Link Trainer, able to simulate not only limited motion and controls but also the workings of flight and navigation instruments. Nowadays, military flight simulators are enormously complex and expensive digital systems with exact cockpit and avionics replicas of the aircraft being simulated, high-fidelity flight models, wrap-around dome projection displays, and the ability to simulate most types of combat. Some are capable of limited movement, but most have given up simulating motion. What’s more, whereas simulators were once used only to introduce new pilots to flying, they’re now a core part of every line all the way through to fighters. Most military pilots now spend around 10-20% of their time flying in simulators, rather than real aircraft, in order to practice certain skills and save costs. But for all the improvement in accuracy and scope, simulators have still been seen as an inferior analogue of actual flying, incapable of delivering the full experience and having value only as a way to introduce aircrew to a new type or ab initio flying and offering a cheaper way to practice skills. This is about to change. A combination of advances in networking, onboarding computing power, and both augmented and virtual reality headsets are converging
