Why Use Simulation? - Return on Investment

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The Armed Services take every precaution to prevent casualities, including training military personnel in survival techniques. Survival rates for naval aircrews whose aircraft crashed into the ocean improved from 49% to 93% with the introduction of Dunker (fixed wing egress) training. Parasail trainers allow pilots to practice releasing parachutes and escaping them in the water. The helicopter Egress trainer allows aircrews to practice underwater escape procedures.

With the safety of personnel and other assets being a paramount concern, training for emergency situations such as landing gear malfunctions are performed exclusively in simulators due to the extremely high-risk involved to both crew and aircraft.

In 1989, a B-1 on a routine training mission from Dyess AFB suffered a landing gear malfunction. The nose wheel would not go down. The B-1 was refueled and stayed aloft for 5 hours while experts tried to determine the cause. A nose gear-up landing profile was flown in the B-1 simulator, and the data from this simulation was used when the aircraft had to make a landing at Edwards AFB with no nose gear. The landing was successful.

The contribution of simulation and training devices has played a significant role in naval aviation safety. In the 1950s the accident rate for naval aircraft was 20 per 100,000 hours. By 1989 the rate had fallen to 2.39 per 100,000 hours.

The cover of darkness provides some tactical advantages, but it also provides some harrowing training challenges. Flying a high performance jet aircraft is inherently dangerous. Flying a high performance jet aircraft onto an aircraft carrier at night is state-of-the-art dangerous. The Navy uses simulation to replicate the experience of night carrier landings to the extent possible to prepare pilots for the real thing.

Modeling and Training Simulation at DoD Labs

• Leg Clearance Ejection Simulations for JPATS.

  The simulations quantified the possible foot and / or shin strikes with the instrument panel. The JPATS SPO was able to take this information to their contractors and improve the cockpit design. The simulators identified any problems before designs were complete. Avoiding costly design changes and improving new member accommodation.

• "BURNSIM" Model

  The Lab BURNSIM Model has eliminated the need to use animals in tests of burn hazard associated with aircraft and life support systems. Thus far, it has been applied to problems as diverse as effectiveness of pilots' flight suits, hazards from freon replacements and burn potential of aerothermal heating at very high speed escape.

Virtual Emergency Room

http://www.afit.af.mil/ENGgraphics/veprojects/ve.html

We are developing a system usable by Emergency Department (ED) personnel for the diagnosis and treatment of patients who have trauma, myocardial infarction, aneurysms, tension pneumothorax, poisonings, acute hemorrhage, or other time-critical medical emergencies. This system may serve to reduce hospital costs and the length of stay for trauma patients admitted through the ED. In addition, the system is suitable for use in mobile military field hospitals.

The technological opportunity now exists to perform the research required to place patient diagnostic and radiological information at the physician's fingertips within an Emergency Department setting using virtual environment technology. The vehicle for this step is the recent advances made within virtual environment technologies. Virtual environment technology can be defined as the human experience of perceiving and interacting through displays, sensors, and effectors with a virtual environment and its contents as if it were real. To implement a virtual environment requires the use of several different technologies. Users of the environment must be given visual and audio cues that are sufficiently accurate to entice the user to suspend disbelief in the virtual environment presentation. In addition, sensors to determine the users position and orientation and a mapping for them from the real to virtual world are needed. Finally, devices that allow the user to control appropriate portions of the environment and the display of the environment are needed. To meet these requirements researchers have investigated rendering techniques and requirements, image display devices, input devices, output devices, sensors, environment descriptions, user interface paradigms, and the virtual environments that could be built with these advances in equipment.

The principal objective of our project is to develop a state-of-the-art virtual reality environment for use within level I and II Emergency Rooms. The facility will allow Emergency Department doctors and other emergency department personnel to access patient textual data, review radiological medical imaging records, examine current radiological medical imaging results, monitor patient vital signs, and monitor output at the patient's side. ED personnel can force important data to the doctor's HMD and vice-versa. The medical imaging data is moved into the ED from the Radiology Department using picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and is segmented according to the doctor's commands and registered against other modalities and/or previous medical imaging data for presentation. The system is now under construction.

Gulf War Analyses

http://dmsttiac.sc.ist.ucf.edu/services/ir/benefits/

Modeling and Simulation has contributed to innumerable decisions involving system evaluation and force sizing. However, it has also contributed significantly to combat operations. In 1990 and 1991, the Air Force Studies and Analyses Agency (AFSAA) perf ormed a series of Gulf War analyses that Lt General Glosson (then chief of CENTAF Special Projects) asserts "...saved literally hundreds of lives."

One main contribution was to choreograph the masses of aircraft into and out of the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations to avoid mid-air collisions and to schedule the rendezvousing of tankers with attack aircraft. They also analyzed the best use of defense suppression assets, and alerted planners of missions that were too hazardous for some aircraft.

For instance, their analyses indicated that it would be too dangerous to carry out plans to send A-6 and Tornado aircraft directly over Baghdad. As a result only F-117 stealth fighters, none of which were lost, were assigned targets in that highly defended area. These changes undoubtedly saved lives and the needless loss of aircraft. When they determined that SCUD sites in Western Iraq were too well defended and (as existing prior to the attack) too hazardous for F-15E attacks, defense suppression miss ions were reconfigured to correct the problem. When aircraft losses occurred, computer simulations were used to help determine the most likely cause so that later missions could be made less dangerous. To ensure that aerial tankers would make their rendezvous with fighters in need of refueling, missions were played out in advance. To avoid mid-air collisions, attacks were carefully choreographed-especially the first day's intense activity.

Simulator flight must be performed satisfactorily before follow-on aircraft flights can be scheduled. Because of their realism and their ability to host emergencies too risky to simulate in aircraft, simulators may be used for:

(1) up to 50 percent of minimum flying hour requirements;
(2) flights to evaluate operational procedures;
(3) instrument and NATOPS check flights; and
(4) 50 percent of minimum flying requirements for instrument rating.

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