Boeing has released a new simulated training system for the USAF's most potent fighter, the F-22 Raptor. Drew Warne-Smith investigates.

Preparing a potent force

The F-22 training system comprises three elements:
Pilot training system (PTS)
Maintenance training system (MTS)
Training system support centre (TSSC).

Training system assets include pilot and maintenance trainers (simulators), instructor-led and student-paced courseware and electronic classrooms. The multi-media courseware and classrooms exploit and extend the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) leading-edge technology and methods used on the Boeing 777 training programme.

The programme's training system is configured to accommodate future technology and mission enhancements, including new aircraft operational flight programmes, weapons and tactics additions, and courseware development and presentation tool improvements.

The pilot training system employs three sophisticated Link Simulation & Training simulators. They include:
Full mission trainer (FMT).
Weapons and tactics trainer (WTT).
Egress procedures trainer (EPT).

The fixed-base FMT flight simulator has the visual realism and dynamics of the external landscape, atmospheric conditions and mission threats and targets of a flight environment. With the additional fidelity of the cockpit controls, displays and instrumentation, the pilots can identify with the intensity of an exciting instrument flight or combat mission scenario. The FMT's external world is seen at flight manoeuvering speeds and offers visibility in all directions.

In the FMT, the pilot sits in a full-scale, fully equipped cockpit set inside a partial, geodesic dome, with nine rear-projected facets. FMTs will be networked in groups of four co-located units at each training site. At these sites, each FMT can operate individually or with any or all of the others to conduct formation missions. FMTs, as with the F-22, incorporate video recording of cockpit and mission activities for post-flight review. The weapons and tactics trainer is a procedural trainer, designed to refine airplane systems and weapon-delivery operating skills prior to training in the FMT, or the actual F-22.

The WTT is a partial cockpit with a dynamic forward-only outside view and faithfully represented mission equipment. It provides essential navigation, communication, and weapons set-up and delivery displays, panels and switches. Pilots use the separately developed F-22 Air Force mission support system (AFMSS) to prepare mission data for the FMT, the WTT and the airplane. The FMT's video equipment records cockpit instrumentation and head-up display (HUD) guidance, cues, overlaying the outside forward field-of-view, to support the post-flight debriefing.

The Egress procedure trainer, primarily supports pilot training on proper aircraft entry and exit under normal and emergency conditions as well as ground and inflight ejection.

The location for the primary maintenance-training system will have seven full-scale, partial airplane mock-ups - built by Link and United Scale Model - as well as a trainer engine built by Pratt & Whitney, that also produces portions of the engine maintenance courseware. These eight devices include the fuel system, on-airplane structures repair, armament, landing gear and auxiliary power supply, aft fuselage, cockpit and forward fuselage, seat and canopy and engines. ach operational base will have three trainers: engine; combined landing gear and auxiliary power system; and combined cockpit, forward fuselage, seat and canopy. The MTS further employs smaller scale laboratory and backshop settings, where component-level work will be trained using a range of expendable parts and serviceable but not flight-worthy components.

The F-22's integrated maintenance information system (IMIS) - the operational tool that records and inter-networks fleetwide maintenance information - will be fully integrated. The more complex trainers, that have onboard diagnostics like their real airplane counterpart functions, will download to IMIS to emulate the transfer and dissemination of real airplane maintenance data.

Trainees and operational flight-line mechanics will use the IMIS laptop-style portable maintenance aid (PMA), an input/output device carried between the flight-line aircraft or training mock-ups and transportable IMIS consoles.

Pilot and maintainer instruction will employ digitally mastered, multi-media computer-based training (CBT) - desktop and wall-projected - that merges video and audio (digitised from analogue recordings); sophisticated graphics (derived from actual F-22 engineering computer-aided design source material); digital photography; and lesson syllabi scripted by subject matter experts (SMEs). Many of the pilot and maintenance SMEs have years of combat experience with current front-line military weapons systems.

The SMEs will use state-of-the-art instructional system design methods, processes and tools developed for the Boeing 777 aircraft training programme. Students, on individual PC-based workstations, walk through self-paced or instructor-led study lessons and tests that incorporate interactive graphics, video and carefully scripted audio. During instructor-led computer-based maintenance training, the instructor uses a console to project courseware material, send courseware to selected workstations and to monitor student activity.

During pilot training, students spend time both in multi-media academic lectures and weapons and tactics trainer classrooms where instructors can project training-mission information and graphically demonstrate procedures, that students then practice on their own WTT cockpit consoles and panels.

The training system support centre (TSSC), with its training management system (TMS), has the tools, methods, processes and technical order data source material to ensure support of the training system, at all locations, over the life of the F-22 programme. The TSSC will modify, enhance and expand the curriculum and equipment as operational experience and new roles and missions emerge.

The TMS, a tool to track student training and testing schedules, also tracks and schedules the availability of all training assets against real-time student requirements. This will minimise the impact training will have on scheduled and unscheduled equipment maintenance.

TSSC configuration management ensures concurrency with the proper aircraft configuration and operation. Each training site gets and retains the most current training materials appropriate to their general and specific mission tasking. The TSSC is the agency that will prepare and distribute future training materials as new roles, missions and weapons are added to the fleet.

As part of the current engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the F-22 programme, Boeing is supporting the F-22 flight test programme at Edwards Air Force Base, California, by developing and conducting interim training for the combined test force (CTF), that includes the initial group of operational pilots and maintainers.

Additional Boeing EMD efforts include developing and procuring all operational TSSC assets such as secure facilities and courseware development workstations. The TSSC will retain and employ the EMD prototype pilot and maintenance training devices as part of their overall tool mix. Production devices are scheduled to be ready for training at the first training site, Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, in January 2003.

The F-22's primary mission is to establish control of any battlefield skies - a must in modern warfare. It provides first-look, first-shot, first-kill capability. The F-22 is a fighter with much improved capability over current US Air Force aircraft. Its stealth, 'supercruise' ability, integrated avionics and other features will make it the most potent fighter in the world.