Page 94 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2021

94 AIRPOWER
NOVEMBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
“Training was moving more around mission rehearsal in a large force employment exercise. So, getting that distributed mission training environment set up where people or operators can plug and play into a common synthetic environment is the challenge going forward.
“When you think about the cross-domain security of various devices, Hawk for example is an unclassified device whereas the F-35 is incredibly classified, and when you start mixing those ones and zeroes you need some smart operators to be able to implement the cross-domain security protocols.”
Nevertheless, operators were getting greater value for money from live flight, concentrating on high end aspects with lower end aspects relegated to simulator time.
EMERGING TRENDS
One apparent trend however, was a move away from expen- sive full motion simulators to lower cost devices that still provided high immersion but were less expensive and more transportable.
Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence have the poten-
LEFT: RAAF pilots fly a mission in the C-130J Full-Flight Mission Simulator during a Coalition Virtual Flag Exercise
BELOW LEFT:
RAAF instructors conduct a Hawk Training Evolution at RAAF Base Pearce in Western Australia
tial to transform training and mission support for multi- domain operations, Sibree commented.
CAE was involved in the Mission Command Systems Common Operation Picture for the US Special Operations Command and the Single Synthetic Environment for the UK Strategic Command where cloud-based synthetic en- vironments offer decision support, what-if course of action analysis, and faster than real-time simulation.
The company was also contracted to develop a cloud- based adaptive learning management system for the US Air Force Pilot Training Transformation initiative. This will le- verage data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline pilot training and create a training process that is continually adapting and improving.
“What we’re seeing, and we’re not the only defence in- dustry to do so, is the Commonwealth starting to take what they traditionally call a below-the-line defence contractor further up into the above-the-line space, acknowledging there are some areas of capability in which they don’t need to have a deep technical understanding,” Sibree said.
“There they will leverage their partners to provide them with impartial advice and this is where the trusted nature of the relationship comes in.”
FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES
Meanwhile CAE Australia is a training partner in the Gen- eral Atomics-led Team SkyGuardian Australia selected in November 2019 to deliver the MQ-9B SkyGuardian as Australia’s first armed medium altitude long endurance (MALE) remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS). The $1.3 billion MQ-9B acquisition proposal is scheduled for gov- ernment consideration in 2021-22.
CAE has delivered MQ-9A training to the USAF for sev- eral years and has worked closely with General Atomics on MQ-9B programmes for the UAE and the Italian Air Force, the latter with what is believed to be the highest fidelity RPAS simulator ever designed. This has been formally
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