DEFENCE Ukraine conflict and flight simulation

Training twins for Ukraine

Could creating a 'synthetic theatre of war' inside military flight simulators assist in fast-tracking Ukrainian fighter pilots to learn Western types? Cp Capt GORDON WOOLLEY FRAeS RAF (Ret'd) of the RAeS Flight Simulation Group, expands on ways current flight simulation and training capability could be harnessed and deployed to accelerate combat pilot training.

RIAT

In the recent AEROSPACE Insight article Ukraine – Time to fast-track front-line fighter pilot training?* AM Greg Bagwell makes some interesting proposals for rapidly enabling Ukrainian fighter pilots to operate Western aircraft, systems, sensors and weapons, and employ Western techniques and procedures, using flight simulation as an important enabler. His ideas are worth exploring more fully, not just because they might give an immediate and essential operational enhancement to the Ukrainian front-line forces, but also because the training capability developed in doing so could be expanded to deliver similar enhancements to other NATO members, not least the Baltic States, and provide NATO air forces with access to ongoing first-person combat experience.

Flight simulator aspects of combat pilot training

When we think of using flight simulation for pilot training, we typically focus on high-end full flight simulators, with very high levels of fidelity to the aircraft, and to its operating environment. However, these are the top rung of a ladder of simulation-based devices and facilities; many of the operational competencies proposed for Ukrainian pilots could be delivered by lower-level devices, selected or adapted for essential features and levels of fidelity. Training experienced fast jet pilots to operate different and more capable platforms and weapons systems falls into three broad categories:

1. ‘Differences’ training: learning the cockpit displays, controls, systems, and performance characteristics.
2. Learning to fly and ‘fight’ the aircraft, experiencing the handling characteristics, and applying sufficient knowledge of the systems, sensors, weapons and so on to be able to exploit their full capabilities.
3. Along with those pilots continuing to operate their existing aircraft and weapons, learning to ‘fight’ the aircraft in the context of other operational enhancements that the new platforms bring to the table, along with other capabilities that Western support is delivering. Collective training in dynamic operational environments is demanding, and its effectiveness more difficult to assess, but it is achievable.

In the third instance it is important to remember that fighter pilots, whatever their role, fight collectively, as part of a multi-component force, to achieve the broader objectives of higher command. Their training should, therefore encompass what is needed to operate in an expanded, information-rich and more complex operating environment. In doing so, it should also, where possible, address the training needs of those involved in the other components in that environment and whose contribution to the achievement of collective capability is vital. In the Ukraine theatre this operational environment may not be nearly as complex as a NATO-led multi-component force but the greater reliance on air battle controllers, real-time intelligence feeds and the need to integrate more fully into the electronic warfare and air defence environment demand more collective training and a better understanding of the bigger picture than Ukrainian pilots may have needed hitherto.

Differences training

Current flight simulation training devices (FSTDs) – the ‘ladder’ referred to earlier – use a broad range of media and hardware in a variety of applications, with features and fidelity levels appropriate to the training task. Virtual reality (VR) and haptic devices are playing an increasingly important part of the mix as technology improves and how best to use them becomes better understood.

Digital media, laptop and desktop computers, iPads, VR headsets and so on provide interactive computer-assisted and computer-based education and training. They are increasingly being used in the classroom, in the briefing room and in flight, and provide a powerful means of accessing, interacting with, recording and sharing digital information of all kinds. As part task trainers, applications can be interactive and adaptive, continuously fitting training delivery to the trainee’s progress. They are extremely effective at developing knowledge of aircraft navigation and communications’ systems, sensors, defensive aids suites and weapons, and introducing trainees to tactics, techniques and procedures in using them.

Cockpit and procedures’ trainers (CPTs) are a step up the ladder. They situate the trainees in a simplified cockpit: flat panels and touchscreens replicate the real aircraft’s displays and systems, and with a throttle and stick programmed with their essential functions and with a simple visual system. Building on the knowledge already gained from desktop trainers, CPTs familiarise trainees with the cockpit layout, engine start and systems set-up and checks, and basic flight procedures and parameters.

For fighter pilots, a key enabler is the mission and tactics’ trainer, a ‘targeted fidelity’ FSTD which expands the features, fidelities and capabilities of the cockpit procedures’ trainer to provide more scope for combat skills development, including tactical manoeuvres, weapon firing and the exploitation of multi-sensor suites. The features and functions of these trainers can be tailored to specific training aims and expanded or modified as operational training needs change.

Low-level FSTDs and media, such as these, are easily relocatable so can be brought to the user. Courseware and instructional support for conversion training to Western fighter types already exist and could quickly be adapted to the needs of Ukrainian pilots. Providing essential systems knowledge and cockpit familiarity, they act as an excellent foundation for more advanced training.

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Training to fly and ‘fight’ the aircraft

High-end flight and full-mission simulators (FMS) accurately replicate the crew’s working environment – displays and controls, outside-world visuals, electronic and communications’ interactions, sounds, vibration and, with some limitations, motion. They enable many advanced skills to be developed and practised, such as the use of night-vision devices, defensive aids suites and electronic warfare, and handling a broad range of malfunctions and emergency situations. Importantly, and unlike live training, they permit the complete operating envelope to be explored and exploited, and the unrestricted use of weapons, emitters, countermeasures and so on as they would be used in extremis in the real aircraft. They also have the ability to record, store and replay the session, significantly enhancing the training value to be derived from the training.

However, they cannot replicate the physical and psychological demands of real combat – high-energy manoeuvres in fast-changing situations against a live adversary, without the cushion of a subliminal knowledge that ‘this isn’t real’. What they can do is enable the pilot to rehearse the mission, squaring away the checks, procedures, sensor and weapons’ selections, manoeuvres and so on, and so maximise the value of real flying time and accelerate the learning process.

The synthetic theatre of war

Combat aircraft rarely operate in isolation, crews must have the skills and awareness to operate effectively as part of larger formations and multi-functional teams. Qualitative training – exercising the decision/ action cycle in a wide variety of encounters and situations – is the key to operational capability and the ability to succeed against numerically superior, but individually less competent and flexible, opponents.

Modern platforms and systems bring more to the fight than their own enhanced capability. Data exchange and sensors make a significant contribution both to real-time, shared situational awareness, and to intelligence gathering on the opponent’s order of battle, tactics, vulnerabilities, and so on. Integrated with the expanded capabilities of other equipment and supporting activities the West is providing, Ukrainian pilots of new, upgraded, and existing, aircraft models will find themselves in a much more complex and information-rich, operational environment.

From the earliest days of air combat, pilots exposed to new theatres of war, new aircraft, unfamiliar enemy aircraft and tactics, and so on, are at their least effective and most vulnerable in the first few missions, while much of their concentration is devoted to making sense of what is going on, rather than focused on the task at hand. Simulation, in the form of a ‘synthetic theatre of war’ (STOW), can put pilots into the new environment, and up against new challenges, so that if they have not quite ‘been there, seen it, and done it’, they have come very close.

A STOW is a computer-generated scenario in which aircrews from all air components and roles, along with command, air battle management and operations staff can act out their operational roles in real-time and realistic conditions, participating via a variety of networked ‘portals’.

FSTDs at any level, from desktop devices to full mission simulators, can act as these portals, the FSTDs for aircrews and role-playing stations for other staff and agencies. The STOW can thus, include the decision-making levels above, complementary roles alongside, and the supporting agencies below, the pilot training audience. These essential operations of personnel include: command and battle management staff, operations controllers, intelligence officers, ground and airborne forward air controllers and joint fires cells, and the air defence environment, and these too require the appropriate knowledge and skills to be able to discharge their roles as part of the operational collective. Their involvement in this collective training, alongside the pilots, fosters shared situational awareness and better understanding of multi-component operations, developed in the context of the air commander’s overall objectives.

A STOW based on the Ukraine theatre of operations would provide a powerful resource to rapidly bring the nation’s air forces up to speed with the enhanced capabilities and their potential. The STOW, its demands, and the nature and extent of participation, could be as simple or as complex as required, or as is possible in the circumstances. The benefits of participation, both individually and collectively, are not limited to ‘box time’, but extend to pre-mission briefing and planning, and post-mission debriefing and after-action review.

Rapid terrain database generation using current imagery, along with off-the-shelf weather and atmospheric models, could provide a very high-fidelity model of the Ukrainian theatre. Highly developed proprietary suites of computer-generated semi-automatic or role player-controlled forces can be used to replicate all of the friendly, threat, and neutral forces’ activities and effects – visual, electronic, weapons etc – on the ground, on or under the sea, or in the air, to be expected in a real operational environment. Their numbers, positions, manoeuvres, performance, emissions and interactions can be representative of their real-world equivalents.

The opposing forces (OPFOR) can be programmed with the performance parameters, systems capabilities, weapons loads, and so on, and controlled to operate to the tactics and behaviours observed being employed by the Ukrainians’ adversaries.

Modern aircraft rely heavily for coordination, effectiveness and survivability on close integration with the communications and electronic battlespace, and it is essential that pilots are fully trained to understand that battlespace and how to exploit it fully. An interactive, all aspect, STOW can provide that training, introducing pilots to the basic operating parameters, then building in battlespace complexity, the intensity and natures of the threat, and so on, producing rapid improving levels of operational competence, tailored to the pilots’ skills and experience.

Flight crews can exercise the full capability of their platforms and systems, with guidance or under instruction where necessary. Although lower-level devices limit the crews’ level of ‘immersion’, the side benefit is that this frees the crews’ cognitive capacity to observe, understand, and assimilate into their decision-making the activities and combat support functions of other aircraft and components, taking in the ‘bigger picture’.

The flexibility and, freedom from real-world training limitations, of the computer-generated scenario mean that synthetic training is, in some significant ways, better than live training in its scope for training in busy, dynamic, operational situations.

Assessing the effectiveness of this sort of ‘qualitative’ training presents a challenge. Taking the lessons from civil flight training methods developed from Evidence-Based Training (EBT) and applying them to mission-essential competencies, is one way of meeting this challenge. 

Measuring effectiveness

The concept of mission essential competencies (MECs) has long been recognised as a useful tool in pilot training, but its scope for training in a wider collective environment is limited. A broader range of Operationally Essential Competencies (OECs), expanding on and enriching MECs along the principles of civil flying’s ‘competency elements’, and reflecting the different nature of military operations, could provide the means of achieving and, using defined ‘performance indicators’, of assessing the ‘qualitative’ individual and collective operational knowledge, skills and awareness needed for combat. OECs could also be defined for the other operations’ personnel and would help to harmonise training objectives across all roles and provide a firmer foundation for shared understanding and awareness.

US VR flight simulation company Vrgineers has already donated one of its Reconfigurable Portable Trainers to the Ukrainian Air Force to assist in pilot training. Vrgineers

The performance indicators for competencies are ‘observable crew behaviours’, which look at not only did the pilot ‘hit the numbers’, but also provide the means of assessing how he or she achieved what they did: what decisions were made, on what evidence, what actions were taken, how the pilot adapted to the evolving situation, and so on.

A number of military competencies, along with appropriate observable behavioural performance indicators, could be added to the civil ‘competency elements’ to demonstrate operational competencies such as:

• Operational Understanding and Awareness; the awareness of the big picture: the theatre of operations, commander’s intent, knowledge of scheme of operations and the friendly and threat forces involved
• Shared situational awareness and understanding
• Sound tactics, techniques, and operational procedures
• Systems, Sensors, Weapons and DAS management

Individual pilot knowledge, skills, awareness, and so on could be dynamically assessed, strengths built on, and weaknesses identified and remedied, throughout the training pipeline.

Conclusions

The proposal to fast-track experienced Ukrainian fighter pilots to fly and fight more capable Western aircraft is well worth pursuing. A combination of live flying hours on the new type, complemented by academic and practical preparation using desktop devices and low-level FSTDs, and high-end full flight simulators, could rapidly enable pilots to develop operational competency and significantly enhance the effectiveness of Ukraine’s air force.

Additionally, establishing a network of low-level FSTDs and workstations able to run a synthetic theatre of war replicating the operation over Ukraine, and involving the key air agencies and battle staff in a dynamic and interactive scenario, could rapidly bring pilots up to speed with the new combat capabilities and able to use the full potential of the West’s contributions. When the crews go into action for the first time in anger, they could have been there, seen it, and done it, or something very like it. Those first few missions, potentially the least productive and most hazardous, would have been rehearsed in their training. They would be prepared for whatever faced them and have a vital edge over an opposition trained by rote. Such a training resource could also be a template for those other smaller, and less experienced, air forces facing a similar threat.

The technologies and training support are readily available now, and a training facility to provide the differences training, and to set up and run a multiparticipant STOW, could be established at a friendly base, convenient to potential users, very rapidly. As experience is gathered, emerging technologies and training techniques could be used to expand the quality and scope of the training. A similar approach might also be applied to training Ukraine’s forces to other Western-supplied military equipment, such as drones and missiles.

At the start of WW2, Polish pilots fled to the UK. They brought with them the experience of fighting, often with considerable success, an invader that was numerically far stronger, and better equipped. Flying more capable fighters from the UK, and with recent combat experience, Polish pilots demonstrated determination, initiative, and enterprise, and their squadrons became a formidable fighting force, particularly when their individual keenness to get at the enemy was harnessed to the collective endeavour. After some reluctance, the RAF realised that they themselves had something to learn from their more combat-experienced peers. Much the same situation presents itself now, again against a common aggressor. The use of flight simulation and synthetic environments provides all friendly forces with a powerful tool to counter that aggression whether it is real and immediate, as for Ukraine, or potential, as it is for the rest of Europe.