Navy Fine-Tuning Acquisition Strategy for Flight Simulators.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 November 2000
• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

Recent investments by the U.S. Navy in flight training technologies denote a focus on systems that are easy to use and to transport to remote locations around the world, even on ships.

Nevertheless, these systems still remain in the prototype phase, and it is not clear what the Navy's strategy will be for purchasing deployable trainers in large quantities. Most of the questions revolve around funding and technological requirements.

"There is a move philosophically toward deployable, reconfigurable transportable flight trainers," said Navy Capt. Rory H. Fisher, program manager for aviation training at the Naval Air Systems Command.

During a recent interview, Fisher noted that the Navy had been experimenting with portable trainers for quite some time. A case in point is a Boeing-developed flight-squadron trainer, which has been deployed on carriers. The Seattle-based company also produced a so-called tactical trainer technology demonstrator.

More recently, the Office of Naval Research sponsored the transportable strike/assault rehearsal system (TSTARS), a flight training system that can be packaged in an ISO container and deployed on aircraft carriers. The TSTARS program was a technology demonstration scheduled for completion in September 2000. The prime contractor is Evans & Sutherland Corporation, based in Salt Lake City.

These attempts notwithstanding, said Fisher, "There are no operational transportable, reconfigurable, deployable simulators in the inventory today." At one point, there were plans to award a production contract for the TSTARS system under a program called DTATS, for deployable tactical training system. But that program, said Fisher, "will not be moving forward in the near future."

The Navy's decision to postpone the trainer purchase can be attributed to budgetary and technological reasons, said Fisher.

"If you wait just a little bit, we'll have a little bit better technology" in areas such as PC-based imagery, for example, he said. "Philosophically, we are going to move that way."

DTATS, he said, "will happen in three to four years. If we wanted to build it today, we probably could." But the technology is improving at such a rapid rate that the Navy would benefit from a wait-and-see attitude, he said. "We are just now at the point where the real cost benefits are coming in with PC-based imagery. Waiting a year is pretty prudent. But it still will not have the fidelity that the larger simulators have."

The transportable systems developed so far, Fisher said, "are low-cost but they don't give all the technology that we want. They are in the $2 million to $3 million price range.

"The devices we are producing as containerized vans, called tactical operational flight trainers, run $7 million to $10 million," he said. That price range is much lower than the $20 million to $40 million the Navy has paid for dome simulators in the past, Fisher added.

Simulators, he noted, cannot replace flight hours, but can help maintain combat skills while at sea. "I don't think we are going to move during the next three to four years towards substituting simulator hours for flight hours. But there is a need to address decreasing readiness...