Special ops aviators press industry to improve trainers.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana
• Position: Operations - Cover Story

The U.S. Army special operations aviators, the Night Stalkers, typically choose training devices that give them the ability to rehearse missions at the drop of the hat, industry officials say.

That is the reason why training systems contractors said their challenge is to develop systems and databases that not only offer high-quality performance and fidelity, but that also can be easily updated.

"They push us constantly," said David Graham, director of special operations forces programs at CAE USA. "We agree on what we can do today, and they ask us to make sure we have created an architecture for improving that, because as soon as a slightly better technology comes along or a slightly better capability or improvement in fidelity, this customer tends to want it."

The customer--the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment--is all over the world, he said. Whether they are at war or not, pilots always are involved in operations and want to be able to train while deployed.

Using government databases and digital maps, contractors develop "common synthetic environments" that replicate geographic areas of the world.

"It is an easy thing to talk about, but a hard thing to do in our business," Graham said. "We tend to [view] each system as its own collection of data. If you make a change, then all systems have to be correlated. The problem is that it takes time.... Somebody has to manually find all correlation errors and correct them."

CAE is the prime contractor for the Army Special Operations Forces Aviation and Rehearsal Systems (ASTARS). The company is under contract for an AH/MH-6 (Little Bird) light assault/attack re-configurable combat mission simulator. The program is estimated at about $50 million.

The company also received a contract to provide desktop and part-task trainers for the MH-47G Chinook and the MH-60K Black Hawk helicopters. That contract is worth $5 million.

At press time, CAE was still negotiating another contract for an MH-47G and MH-60K combat mission simulator. This work is expected to run about $85 million.

"The negotiation is primarily to finalize the requirement jointly," said Graham. "Instead of the traditional approach, where the customer throws a requirement over the wall and we respond to it and throw our answer over the wall, once we were selected, we have been finalizing the requirements jointly with the customer."

The upcoming delivery of new aircraft--the MH-47G and the MH-60K--to the Special Operations Aviation...