On deck: navy sailors experience 'virtual' shipboard flight operations.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Training & Simulation

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The Navy until recently introduced junior officers and senior enlisted sailors to the art of launching helicopters from ships in two dramatically different ways. On the East Coast, sailors had to use their imaginations to visualize the process. On the West Coast, sailors had access to a video game-like display, but many of the details were wrong.

A new training simulation immerses them in flight deck operations from the vantage point of an officer in the control tower. Officials say the trainer is a big improvement over what the training squadrons had before.

Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron-2 in Norfolk, Va., used wooden handheld models of aircraft to show control officers and landing signalmen enlisted how to direct safe takeoffs from flight decks. Its sister squadron in San Diego taught the process in a mockup control tower using an obsolete digital trainer. The simulation featured robotic flight deck crew avatars that employed inaccurately modeled hand signals to launch an outdated helicopter.

Tired of the "negative" training imparted by its old simulator, Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron-3 in San Diego requested help. Officials reached out to the Office of Naval Research's TechSolutions program for a rapid fix.

The ONR team tapped Lockheed Martin Corp. to develop new software for the trainer. The company previously had built the Marine Corps' immersive infantry trainer housed in a former tomato packing plant at Camp Pendleton, Calif. The simulation blends a virtual environment into actual Hollywood-style sets of home interiors and marketplaces where small units conduct pre-deployment training. Lockheed engineers reused portions of that simulation code to develop the helicopter control officer tower trainer in three months for approximately $300,000, officials said.

"The training has as much fidelity as it requires for the type of training it is," said Master Chief Petty Officer Stephen C. French Jr., who manages the TechSolutions program.

The simulation is meant to function as the culminating event to a two-day course that covers topics such as helicopter air dynamics and air traffic control. Sailors proceed step by step through the simulation, which is often their first exposure to flight deck operations.

"They're not certified to do this job when they're done with this," said French. "They just know what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to do it." The bulk of the training occurs when the sailors step...