At RAF Coningsby a team of 20 BAE Systems experts train new and experienced Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon pilots for life on a frontline fighter squadron. Their workplace is a five-minute stroll from the hangars and runway in a building that wouldn’t look out of place on a modern office park.
But once you get through the doors it’s a different matter entirely. It’s a purpose-built high-tech environment that first opening its doors in 2005, and its currently undergoing a multi-million upgrade. The whole unit is designed to make the simulated experience for pilots as valuable as possible.
The team call it ‘real life friction’. Sounds trivial, but those three little words carry a lot of weight in the synthetic world of Eurofighter Typhoon fast jet training. It’s all about the ongoing quest for realism. To take the virtual Typhoon world to levels of never-before-seen realism and make the experience increasingly valuable for the pilots who use the sims.
“The phrase ‘real life friction’ is all about the added realism that we can now inject into the synthetic world,” says David Hake, one of BAE Systems’ Aircrew Simulation Instructors and himself a former RAF Tornado Weapons Systems Officer – that’s a ‘wizzo’, navigator or back seater in less formal terminology. “The level of immersion the pilots will experience is incredible.”
In short, the synthetics team from BAE Systems — typically former fast jet instructor pilots themselves — can control the simulated world. They can set the weather, the daylight, and introduce a vast array of other elements into the scenario, such as civilian aircraft. Oh yes, they can even make individual aircraft systems fail.
It’s all with the purpose of creating the jeopardy needed to prepare pilots either for the real life faff they will encounter or for their toughest most complex missions.
For instructors the synthetic systems mean they are able to mimic or replicate many of the ‘frictions’ pilots will experience for real, says David. “Some things we can't replicate in the sim, such as pulling G, and that is why any pilot will tell you training will always require an irreducible level of live flying. But when you consider real life frictions there are things that we can introduce.
“For certain training sorties, we get the pilots dressed-up in full flight kit. That makes them slightly warm and uncomfortable so they can anticipate this aspect of restricted movement in the cockpit and deal with it in the real aircraft.
“In addition, in the live environment, there are lots of civilian aircraft airborne at any particular time. We can introduce a feed into the system that will display many of the hundreds of civilian aircraft that are usually flying in the UK at any given time. In effect, we will fill up a pilot’s radar with ‘real-world’ information.”
Real life friction
Real life friction can also mean niggly things like degrading the aircraft’s radio performance mid-flight, so pilots may miss certain radio calls leading to a possible reduction in their ability to know what's going on. It is all about preparing them for things that may never happen, but ensuring they know what to do if it does.
“Or we can introduce icing layers in the weather where pilots don't want icing layers to be!” says Dave — with just the hint of a smile. “The aim is to expose pilots to typical difficulties — like a cloud being in the wrong place when they're trying to get into close formation — and this makes it all more realistic.
“The idea is to make it challenging without stopping them from achieving the overall aims of the sorties and do it all in a synthetic world where you can hone the skills they need in the real world.”
In essence, this breed of simulators handle and perform just like a real Typhoon jet and they’ll be able to interoperate with many other aircraft. In time the plan is for the simulators environments to link up with those in other domains — maritime, land and space. In addition, the training team will have the ability to update the software as the aircraft develops. Effectively, it will be future-proofed.
The advances aren’t limited to the software and visuals. The chase for greater realism extends the cockpit too. The latest simulators now offer an uninterrupted 360-degree view of the world.
Part of the virtual world revolution. The projectors are externally mounted, hence there are no longer any projectors on view from the cockpit. Meanwhile, the instructors watch from another room. They have a bank of 8 screens, one of which has a live feed look at the pilot’s face to see their reactions.
As soon as simulators were introduced to aid pilot training the debate started about their true value and how to get the live-synthetic balance right. It’s a debate that’s raged ever since.
Striking the balance
“It's not a new thing,” says David, who trained in an era when simulators were more primitive.
“The Tornado F3 sim I went through had a painted white cockpit you couldn't see out of. The idea back then of moving the majority of training from a live to a simulator environment was laughable because there were so many limitations.
“Today, synthetic training is a world away from that. The pilots tend to enjoy the simulator work because they get to do things they wouldn't necessarily be able to do in the air. They get to fight against opposition they wouldn't see for real.”
And, as the argument for greater use of synthetics in the training world continues to grow — they’re more sustainable, it’s easier to conduct complex mission training and much cheaper to conduct compared to that of flying real aircraft; therefore, the need to make simulators closer to the real thing makes even more sense.
Welcome to the brave new world of simulators — with added real life friction.