There’s no such thing as a two-seat F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Unless you’re a pilot, the Full Mission Simulator is the closest you can get to taking this fifth-generation jet on a test drive. But at this level of fidelity, it’s a ride that will make you believe.

The F-35 FMS is the top dog in a host of sophisticated training systems and devices being developed for JSF pilots and maintenance crews. Its 360-degree dome display, developed specially for the F-35, is like no other. It’s a translucent, crystal-ball-like structure with a keyhole-shaped entrance through which the cockpit enters and exits on a rail. The inside of the dome is treated with a secret coating that will be able to accommodate eye limiting resolution visuals, even though that technology isn’t yet available. Software driving the simulator is the same software from the aircraft; it has the same Martin Baker ejector seat; everything in the simulated cockpit that the pilot touches — every grab handle, rudder pedal and interface — is the same as in the aircraft.

The first FMS and the other F-35 training devices are being developed and built by Lockheed Martin in Akron, Ohio. From there, Lockheed will soon start shipping simulators to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the hub for all pilot and maintenance crew training. The Integrated Training Center (ITC) being prepared there will become the world’s largest, most advanced jet fighter schoolhouse.

The F-35 Lightning II training program is as complex as the aircraft development program, which incorporates three variants for three U.S. services and nine participant countries. Current plans will deliver around 3,100 aircraft to the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and the armed forces of the United Kingdom, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, Australia, Norway, Denmark and Canada. (Israel and Singapore have also agreed to join the program as security cooperation participants.) There’s an air force conventional take-off and landing variant, the F-35A; a short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) variant, the F-35B; and a carrier variant, the F-35C.

And what they all have in common is a need for training, lots of it. Lockheed Martin, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for the F-35, is also lead contractor and integrator for the simulators, training devices, classrooms and courseware that will be delivered to the pilots and maintenance crews. The emphasis is on commonality, hence the ITC at Eglin will serve as training central for all F-35 users with cutting edge, immersive technologies styled to a new era of 21st century pilots and engineers.

Just as the aircraft program is proceeding on parallel tracks, with software and hardware developments and flight testing on overlapping timescales, so the training program is also a concurrent effort with fierce deadlines (see timetable box). At Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support’s Akron facility, the center for most of the development and integration work, the size and scope of the project is apparent. Spread across numerous buildings, there’s the first FMS in build; the first Mission Rehearsal Trainers (MRTs) in production; a mock-up of the Deployable Mission Rehearsal Trainer (DMRT) for customers to review; an Aircraft System Maintenance Trainer (ASMT) classroom set-up that’s updated and tested as new software comes in; development programs for a Weapons Loading Trainer (WLT) and an Ejection System Maintenance Trainer (ESMT); and labs devoted to specialized work such as database development for the simulator image generators (IGs) and the pilot’s simulated helmet-mounted display (HMD). It’s a hive of training technology and acronyms.

SEARCH FOR SIMULATOR ATHLETES

Getting to this point, with the first of the major training devices about to go into customer review at Akron before they start shipping to Eglin, was a marathon in itself. Lockheed Martin embarked on a two-year process to search for training and simulation industry partners worldwide.

“We wanted to make sure that we specified what products we wanted. We took the ‘best athlete’ approach; we would go out to the suppliers and find out a lot of information from them. We delivered our expectations so that we didn’t ask for something that didn’t exist,” said Tom Morrish, Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support program manager, JSF training devices.

Randy Wallace, Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support computer systems architect manager, describes it as a “canvassing” process. “We wanted to stretch boundaries and give everyone a fair chance through the requests for information. There were a lot of site evaluations and demonstrations. We started with a specification that we definitely thought would stress people’s capabilities and then saw what pushback resulted. There were cost-versus-schedule restraints that had to be balanced. Our concept was to pick the best value suppliers,” he said.

The result was that a slew of subcontractors that includes AAI Corp, Northrop Grumman, Rockwell Collins and Thales was brought onboard as training system partners. With the team in place, Lockheed set about the task of turning a training management system plan into a set of real simulators and training devices.

There were some ground rules that defined the shape of the training systems. First, there was a requirement, set by the customer, that no aircraft be used as a training tool.

That ups the fidelity demand and requires that training systems are truly immersive. When an engineer, for instance, walks up to the aircraft, he must immediately feel familiar with its structure and sub-systems and that familiarity will have come from his computer-based training.

In all of the simulators, actual F-35 software is used to give the most realistic experience possible while accelerating the process for software upgrades as the F-35 continues to mature. There are also many legacy and commercial-off-the-shelf software tools that make training affordable.

“The JSF is a very sensor-intensive aircraft and has a lot more sensors than aircraft in the past,” Morrish said. “We have focused on that very intensely with the IG and the projectors and we believe we have very accurate simulations of the sensors as a result. We have used aircraft software and because we are the aircraft OEM, we are not guessing; it’s hand-in-glove fidelity.”

DEPLOYABLE MISSION TRAINER

Another defining point was the Navy’s requirement for a deployable mission rehearsal trainer that could be containerized and put on a carrier or deployed to a home base. The footprint for that DMRT, which must house two full cockpit simulators, visual displays and an instructor station within a space 8 feet wide by 8 feet tall and 20 feet long, set the size standards for all the simulators because of another requirement that all software and hardware be common.

“You can network two DMRTs and have a four-ship. You can take them to sea and also take them to home bases. They have the same software and same simulations as all the other trainers. We call them simulators in a box. It is a requirement that they are Distributed Mission Operation compliant and we have a plan to get there by the initial operational capability timeframe of around 2014. We will network them to prove that capability,” Morrish said.

Lockheed has built a DMRT mock-up in Akron so customers can visualize how it will look. The instructor station sits between the two cockpits, facing the opposite way. It has the exact same visual systems as the other simulators, with two projectors and a smaller out-of-the-window display of 108 degrees by 50 degrees for each cockpit.

A second container, 10 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet, contains the power, air conditioning and filtering systems.

Adding to the size constraints, Lockheed engineers were also told that the FMS dome would have to fit inside existing Air Force F-16 simulator facilities, which dictated the dome’s unique design with a flattened top. Lockheed contracted U.K. company SEOS to design and build the dome and also to provide its Zorro projectors. (There are 25 projectors in the dome and two for each MRT.) SEOS has since been acquired by Rockwell Collins, which earlier also acquired Evans & Sutherland, whose EPX IG is used on the simulators.

BUILDING FROM THE GROUND UP

A number of other challenges had to be addressed.

“When you start with a brand new aircraft there is no existing knowledge base. You have to build all the way from the ground up. We have done a good job. We talk weekly with the Fort Worth people [where the aircraft is built], we have a site liaison in Fort Worth and have a good rapport built up. We have someone at Fort Worth that we can ask questions of and get questions to,” Morrish said.

The industry partners also had to find a way to work together — training working groups met every six months with all of the services to look at all the hot buttons — and figure how to bring together the different training cultures of all the customers involved. “Each service had their own legacy way of training, especially on the maintenance side, and we had to get to a common understanding. On the pilot side, they wanted the best visuals technology,” Morrish said.

The need for visual system fidelity led Lockheed to the decision to prepare for eye limiting resolution even though that technology is not yet available.

“Eye limiting resolution has always been the Holy Grail. We can’t get there now, but in the future we believe it will be feasible, so we want to put the infrastructure in place now so that it will be ready for that. This is why there’s a special coating on the inside of the dome,” Morrish said.

Morrish declined to give further details on the coating, saying it was proprietary technology that the company wished to keep secret for now. However, TSJ understands that Lockheed has used a high gain coating since, in a dome, a high gain leads to better contrast. Without good contrast, pixels wash together and eye-limiting acuity is unachievable. To project onto a high-gain dome, however, one needs — ideally — a single projector that fills the dome and with an exit pupil (lens) nearly co-located with the pilot’s head; otherwise, there’s too much brightness variation because of the high screen gain.

This technology decision, in the quest for realism, led to one of the FMS’s quirkiest features: the keyhole entrance and the cockpit-on-a-rail system. Typically, a fast-jet dome simulator has the cockpit sitting inside the dome display, either on the ground or on a platform. Not so with the F-35 FMS. The pilot gets into the cockpit outside the dome, climbing in exactly as he would in the aircraft. After strapping on the seat, the cockpit is then electronically driven through the keyhole and into the center of the dome, where it is raised to the level where training can begin. What this means is that the pilot and other humans never walk inside the dome, potentially touching and contaminating that sensitive coating.

With the MRT, the same cockpit is used but it sits on a platform with two Zorro projectors in landscape format. The display has a 109-degree horizontal by 55-degree vertical field of view.

All validation on the FMS will be done in Akron and was due to start in November. Customers will rotate through to do their individual validations. The FMS will be torn down in summer 2010 and then be ready for delivery to Eglin. The first MRT will tear down in February, ready for delivery in the second quarter of 2010.

HELMET-MOUNTED DISPLAY CONTRACT

Another challenge was the F-35’s helmet-mounted display and how to replicate that in the simulator. It’s a binocular system still under development and drove the specifications Lockheed looked for in the simulator’s out-of-the-window display requirements.

Lockheed intends to build a helmet that looks and feels identical to the F-35 HMD while not incurring the cost of using actual helmets. (The F-35’s pilot controls are so HMD-intensive that each pilot will get a helmet uniquely built to fit.)

Colleen Arthur, Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support director, fighter trainers, said the company was working to place a contract for the simulated helmet this year, likely by the I/ITSEC convention timeframe in early December, and was also working a schedule to decide which low rate initial production this would fall in.

Lockheed Martin is making all of the databases and putting them through the Rockwell Collins tools to make them work with the Rockwell IG. The database includes 3,000 buildings and Lockheed is under contract to build datasets for the Eglin and Nellis Air Force bases and also to provide the Rockwell Collins whole-Earth database. Two facilities, one in Akron and another in Eglin, are being used to build the databases. There will be day and night versions.

The JSF’s many sensors, including a midwave infrared for the distributed aperture radar and forward looking infrared (FLIR) as well as a targeting FLIR, demand high fidelity IG and database content. A lot of the simulation is physics based, with halo effects, light pools, sun and moon halos, and differences in sun position matched by changes in the shadowing so that it’s more realistic and three dimensional.

IMMERSIVE CLASSROOMS

The ASMT maintenance training devices, being built by AAI Corp, are all correlated in one location with 12 student stations to a classroom and an instructor station at the front of the classroom. Each student console has two monitors; the instructor station has four screens, one that can monitor what each student is doing as each runs through his own tasks. The student gets real-time feedback on how he is doing with tasks performed getting a green, yellow or red light. The instructor can take control of a student station or just watch and monitor. The instructor can also project a student’s screens onto a large screen for all the class to see.

Touchscreens show real pieces of the aircraft equipment. Everything in the real world is shown in the virtual world; a student engineer can open aircraft panels, move around the aircraft, open a toolbox. It’s a step beyond computer-based training because it does not have to be scripted. There are freeplay and scripted modes, and in the freeplay mode the student console becomes a familiarization tool where the student first gets to know the aircraft.

“It’s the classroom of the future, very interactive and very immersive. I think we have got a winner,” Morrish said.

“The Eglin ITC will turn out pilots and maintainers who are fully mission-qualified,” Lockheed Martin vice president and F-35 deputy program manager Eric Branyan said at a briefing in Washington, D.C. “Technology is integral to the training center and allows pilots and trainers to receive hands-on interactions.”

Starting next year, the ultimate training technology will be put through its paces.