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por soultrain » Dom Abr 13, 2008 9:36 pm
Raptor’s solo challenge
It’s sim to single seat for younger pilots training on F-22
By Jack Weible
February 25, 2008
Like most next-generation aircraft, flight training for the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 fighter has been limited to the more-experienced pilots during the aircraft’s formative years, a recognition of the aircraft’s price tag and the need for a steady hand at the throttle in case of problems in flight. But after four years of training those mature pilots, the Raptor program is preparing its first basic training course for four lieutenants, three of whom only recently completed the fighter fundamentals course.
That quartet of young officers — “the best of the best” picked from a flock of pilots all wanting to fly the single-seat Raptor — will move in March to Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., where all non-operational F-22 instruction is conducted, to begin seven months of training. They’ll be part of the 43rd Fighter Squadron that is responsible for providing aircrew training for the Raptor, for which 112 have been built to date by lead contractor Lockheed Martin, and 105 delivered to the Air Force.
After leaving the “B course,” the F-22 qualified pilots will move on to operational squadrons around the U.S. that host Raptors: Langley Air Force Base, Va.; Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska; and Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., in the near future
It’s an important transition phase for the Air Force, which has orders for 183 aircraft but badly wants more to fill a need to be ready for future threats and offset growing problems with its aging F-15 fleet. Discussions have begun on Capitol Hill for 20 additional Raptors, but there are no assurances that lawmakers will provide the funds and even then, F-22 proponents say, the Air Force needs many more than that.
The B course, about twice as long as the transition training courses going on at Tyndall since 2004, faces the unique issue of teaching new students with relatively few flying hours in a fighter how to prepare themselves for their first flight in the actual Raptor — a single-seat aircraft. Unlike the F-16 and F-15 training programs, there are no two-seat trainer aircraft with an instructor in the back seat for the Raptor, leaving an inherently higher risk to students on their first flights.
Air Force officials, however, say the training syllabus has taken that factor into account for the B course.
“We’re going to have a brand new concept of engines, of flight controls [for those students]; all that stuff is new, so, obviously, we’ve cut those and spread them out,” said Lt. Col. David Krumm, 43rd Fighter Squadron commander. “So it’s more academic classes, more tests, and what you’ll find is we have a lot more simulators, as well. In particular, we have about 50 percent more simulators than in the F-15 or F-16 course.”
Those simulators are an Egress Procedures Trainer to learn cockpit ejection and canopy separation procedures, a lower-fidelity Weapons Tactics Trainer used in consort with classroom instruction and, most important, a Full Mission Trainer built to resemble an actual Raptor cockpit and which offers a 360-degree field of vision. All were designed by L-3 Link Simulation and Training and produced by Boeing, which designs the courseware for the curriculum.
The four Raptor trainees also will have taken an F-22 pre-qualification course at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., before Tyndall to fly F-16s so they can get familiarized on intricate maneuvers such as aerial refueling and takeoff and landing, Krumm said, as well as being exposed to nine G forces that even high-fidelity simulators cannot replicate.
Gen. William Looney, commander of Air Education and Training Command (AETC), which oversees F-22 training, said the syllabus is sound. “I’m very confident that we have done everything we can to mitigate the risk that you have of putting a young pilot into a very demanding and challenging environment; i.e. flying the F-22, realizing that every time he flies that airplane, he will be solo. The first time he goes to the tanker to get gas will be solo. The first time he does it at night will be solo. The first time he pulls nine Gs in the F-22, he’ll be solo.”
F-22 transition training at Tyndall has been of shorter duration, about three to four months. When it first took shape, only the most experienced pilots could join the program, and many had up to 1,500 hours of fighter experience. That’s down to 600 to 700 hours, and “we’ve had pilots with as few as 350 hours,” Krumm said.
Generally, 65 to 75 pilots undergo training each year at Tyndall, and usually three classes are going on simultaneously, Krumm said. A beginning class engages in academics given by Lockheed Martin personnel (the company provides F-22 and F-15 training at the base). “Academics for us in the Raptor consist of academic lectures, electronic workbooks, hands-on in the Weapons Tactics Trainer [WTT], which are not quite high-fidelity, and then the actual FMTs, Full Mission Trainers,” he said.
That goes on for a little more than a month when students are not on the flight line.
A second class is usually on the flight line, just beginning the first stages of flying. “That class is going through the transition rides, the advanced handling maneuvers, the basic flying maneuvers,” Krumm said. “Then we usually have a senior class on the flight line that is usually in the December training phase, on the on-range, beyond-visual-range training. It’s like graduate level.”
Coupled with that, Tyndall also routinely does its own instructor training. “And we’ll also intermix sometimes senior officer classes where we train commanders of groups and wings to fly the F-22,” Krumm said.
Unlike, say, the F-15 syllabus, F-22 training routinely mixes classroom lectures with training on the WTT and moves students in and out. Several WTTs can be linked for single, double and four-ship training.
“They’ll sit and drill using a WTT as a part-task trainer that’s high fidelity in switches, high fidelity in avionics and lower fidelity in many of the other areas,” such as lacking an ejection seat, realistic side panels and an out-the-window view that’s only straight ahead, said Dean Proffitt, pilot training systems manager at Boeing and a former F-16 pilot. “But it’s a very good trainer for the purpose, and that’s reinforcing the learning objective and doing a group environment.”
From there, it’s on to the FMT, which features Link’s SimuSphere visual display for 360-degree field of view. The pilot sits in a full-scale, fully equipped cockpit that’s set inside a partial geodesic dome with nine-channel display. The FMTs can be networked in groups of four at each training site.
The FMT visuals are “a bright system,” said Leo Rickmers, senior program manager for F-22 training at Link. “The attention to detail in the software is, I think, significant in that, because of the nature of the Raptor and its mission, we put a lot more attention into the threat environment so that the fidelity of what the pilot sees is much higher. We’ve put a significant amount of work into that over the past few years, and we do work with the various commands in the Air Force to help provide us with real-world data.”
The in-and-out classroom/simulator training is unique to the F-22, Proffitt said. The F-16 had a cockpit familiarization trainer that was “essentially a switchology trainer where you learned your initial procedures and so forth,” then proceeded to a single-ship simulator, which, “while it was tied to the academics, wasn’t an integral back and forth between the classroom and the WTT classroom and the classroom FMT.”
Krumm said that although Tyndall relies much more on simulators for Raptor training than in other aircrew programs, pilots and instructors view the FMTs as mostly up to the task. “This is a high-fidelity sim that is worthy of the airplane.” But he added that F-22 training brings some challenges even the FMT cannot replicate. Air refueling, for example. “Our simulator is not a motion simulator, so the high fidelity that’s required — in particular, we call it a high-gain environment when your muzzles and your inputs are rapidly changing because you’re flying very close to airplanes, like air refueling or flying close formation — that’s very difficult to replicate. It’s not the sim’s fault, it’s our human brain where our sensory features, our ears and our eyes, don’t match,” Krumm said.
Pilots in such situations might get the feeling that “I pulled up, I didn’t feel anything, I need to pull up a little more,” he added. “You can get yourself into a [pilot-induced] oscillation” and crash the plane.
Overall, however, “we’re very happy” with the simulators, he said. “As a matter of fact, we use the simulators not only here, but also the Air Combat Simulator up in Marietta, Ga. It is a series of four simulators that Lockheed Martin built, initially to help test the F-22 in its capabilities, but also its fidelity as far as the ability to replicate threats.”
Krumm said he hasn’t heard complaints from pilots about being limited to simulators in early training. “Obviously, the aircraft is much different than some of the legacy airplanes such as the F-15. Our academic and simulation is extensive but very well thought out, and it works very well.”
When it comes time for trainees to leave the sim and enter the actual Raptor cockpit, program officials have planned carefully, because there is no back-seat security by way of an instructor. The first time pilots strap in, an instructor on a headset goes through the entire ground operations procedures during which the student starts the aircraft, runs through the checks and then shuts down the engine without the aircraft ever leaving the ground.
Different from other fighters, new Raptor pilots do their “emergency procedures and evaluations” in a simulator as part of their pre-flight check ride. “Prior to actually flying, you have to pass your check ride in a simulator. Once you’ve demonstrated that, then we allow you to come over to the flight line,” Krumm said.
“Because of AETC, we spend a lot of time working emergencies procedures and malfunctions,” Link’s Rickmers added. “And that’s a key element that the guys at Langley don’t care so much about, but the guys at Tyndall really emphasize because it’s part of their curriculum and the way they want to focus their students.”
Pilots need four flights in a Raptor before they qualify for instrument qualification. Although the F-22 lacks a second seat, Tyndall has two aircraft on base, and an instructor is always nearby in the second F-22. “I am monitoring the student from the other airplane during all the phases of flight,” said Krumm, who has been squadron commander for a year and a half.
Weather is regarded as an essential element of training in the simulator. “We’ll dial up weather, as much as we want. And during the first four flights, we actually require that be in the VMC, Visual Meteorological Conditions,” he said, where the pilot is responsible for seeing other air traffic.
Flying in the actual aircraft, pilots have no restrictions about flying through clouds. “In our case, they’re qualified down to the 700-foot ceiling with at least two miles of visibility,” Krumm added. “As long as the weather is better than that, we can go out and fly.”
Preparing the four lieutenants — one of whom already is an instructor pilot — for the B course has meant modifying the curriculum: more course work on how the engines work, for example. And pilots going through the Air Force’s fighter fundamentals course now experience an F-22 centrifuge in their centrifuge training. That, combined with the pre-qualification course at Luke and the electronic workbook/classroom instruction/ WTT/FMT rotation at Tyndall, should overcome any inexperience issues, Krumm said.
“The student gets it four different times and he’s able to apply that very quickly. So the knowledge is not just book knowledge or PowerPoint knowledge, there’s actual application in the WTT and the FMT,” he said. “Very quickly, we really found that reinforced the learning.”
If all goes well, the four Raptor trainees — who were selected from a larger group of eight nominated by the fighter wings — will graduate in September or early October and then go on to operational squadrons at Langley, Elmendorf and Holloman.
“Then we’ll take three to four months to retool the syllabus to incorporate the lessons learned that we have,” Krumm said. “We know we’re pretty close, but after this group of four goes through, we may need to add stuff here. There may be stuff to take away, too.
F-22 training also is advancing in other ways. The program is slated to join the service’s Distributed Missions Operations in June 2009, Rickmers said, and Raptor pilots in operational squadrons then will be able to network on upgraded FMTs to others training on F-15E and AWACS simulators, for example.
Training has advanced by leaps and bounds from the early days of 1997 and 1998 when, according to Pam Valdez, Boeing F-22 sustainment director, the company was doing early training of Raptor pilots from Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the Air Force at test sites at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., and Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
“We did that, of course, without trainers,” Valdez said. “We used aircraft lavatories as our training assets back then, and the aircraft was still very much in design. We were updating courseware every time we talked.” å
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