Posted on 01/22/2024 8:12:11 AM PST by fireman15
The biggest threat to American air superiority is not Russia selling high performance combat aircraft to countries like China, but the development of really inexpensive flight simulators. Over the last decade, computers have become a lot cheaper, and the graphics capability of these machines has skyrocketed.
That's important in bringing the cost of realistic flight simulators down to a level that any country can afford. Until a decade ago, a realistic combat flight simulator cost about as much as the aircraft it was simulating. While that did reduce the cost (per "flying" hour) of pilots practicing, it was not enough of a savings to make it practical for less wealthy countries to get these simulators and use them heavily.
The new generation of simulators cost up to a tenth of the price of the aircraft they simulate. Suddenly, countries like China can buy dozens of simulators, and give their pilots enough realistic training to make them a threat in the air (at least to Western pilots).
Each of these simulators can be run about 6,000 hours a year. While a hundred hours a year in a simulator isn't a complete replacement for actual air time, it's close enough if the training scenarios are well thought out. And another 40-50 hours of actual air time gives you a competent pilot. Add another few hundred hours using commercial (game store bought) flight simulators (especially when played in groups via a LAN), and you have some deadly pilots. The Chinese have, since the 1990s, stressed the use of PCs as a foundation for cheaper and more powerful simulators. Now they have an opportunity to really cash in on this insight.
(Excerpt) Read more at strategypage.com ...
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1559911/posts
I thought that the discussion back then was interesting. Anyone who remembers what flight simulators were like 18 years ago knows that the level of realism was quite a bit less than now.
I had to edit out the sentence, “Thus we had a continuation of the situation where countries could scrape together enough money to buy high performance aircraft, but not enough to pay for all that flight time needed to make their pilots good enough to face the Americans.” to make the article fit in the Body of Thread box when trying to put this up. So you might want to visit the original link.
However, no amount of simulation will compensate for a lack of real aircraft training, simply due to the G-load dynamics involved.
That’s a fascinating insight. I look forward to real pilots chiming in on whether this is a realistic scenario. Can thousands of hours on a sim and 40-50 hours in a jet really produce a competent pilot?
I bought one flight simulator for my Mac SE back around 1988. It was a WW 2 Pacific theater combat simulator. You can imagine how primitive it was. A few years later my wife got me MS Flight Sim which was a staggering leap forward. But even that was primitive compared to what today’s sims do.
Back in 2006 when this article was written... my neighbor and I had Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator and setup a network with cat 5 cable strung between our houses. We used play this game frequently. It started a mini arms race between us where we each kept upgrading our computers and peripherals such as joysticks, control yokes, rudder pedals, etc... to get whatever advantage that we could.
We both still live on an the same “airpark” and own General Aviation aircraft. I don’t know that this activity helped improve either of our actual flying skills. But it was fun shooting down my wily opponent.
I remember waiting years and years for Falcon 4,0, as it bankrupted company after company. When they finally released it in December 1998, I was ecstatic. The highest level of detail at the time. The code was leaked to the public a decade later and upgrades and mods kept it alive for quite a while. I heard MircoProse bought Falcon back, but I don’t know their plans for it.
We crushed it in the first Gulf War in part because of simulators. In that case, tank simulators (much easier to “do” than high performance jet fighter simulators). That story goes back to the late 1980s.
Wired magazine article on the simulators:
War Is Virtual Hell
Bruce Sterling reports back from the electronic battlefield.
https://www.wired.com/1993/01/virthell/
Quintessential battle report from that war:
Battle of 73 Easting
by Capt H.R. McMaster (later General McMaster)
https://app.box.com/s/plg2wis5mrd6qlfntfrl1lr79ax0bx1f
I don’t disagree flight simulators can are better then they have ever been, but flight simulation vs cockpit time, particularly in combat simulation I think would be very different.
You aren’t fighting multiple G’s in a flight simulator.
Not that simulators offer nothing, clearly they do, but I’d be hard pressed to believe a pilot who’s been trained in a simulator is going to be on par with one who’s actually done combat training in a real jet.
I’ll yield to the folks who have hands on experience, but I am hard pressed to believe that simulators put you on par with actually flying a combat aircraft... They certainly can lessen the amount of actual time needed in the aircraft, as you can learn how to do the basics with less time in the plane, but fully substitute for flight hours in combat situations? Unless flying the jets remotely, I really really don’t think you can simulate the G forces and other things you are going to experience in actual flight
Sure we can spin you around fast enough to simulate multiple G’s, but we can’t apply multiple g’s to you instantaneously when you do something in a simulator that would result in that load on your body, etc.
Good for training drone pilots too, yes?
Needed: A weapon which will deny entire swaths of the sky to anything that flies except birds.
Simulator instructors told us that the simulators for more advanced aircraft were harder to fly than the actual airplanes because they put less money into the simulators.
The simulators also let you fly most airfields around the world, and some of them are quite interesting.
Simulators would also allow pilots to train for scenarios that normally take thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to coordinate, such as this drill in Taiwan where they use highways as runways:
How do you simulate a hard g-turn that, without a suit, drains the blood from your head and knocks you out?
In fact, we’re almost at the limit of the human body being able to take these kinds of stresses. Future aircraft may be unmanned because of it.
Just to back up your post, here’s a link to a high-end PC gamer HOTAS (Hands-On Throttle and Stick) controller for combat flight sim games.
https://www.amazon.com/Thrustmaster-Throttle-Simulation-Official-Aircraft-PC/dp/B00371R8P4
$550!
And I’d bet money the same guys buying those, are buying monitors like this. As in plural, stacking two.
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-DisplayPort-Mini-LED-DisplayHDR-LS57CG952NNXZA/dp/B0CDQM55C9
Only $2k each!
Costco is currently selling a very similar LG UltraGear 49” Class DQHD Curved Gaming Monitor with 5120 x 1440 Resolution, 240Hz Refresh Rate, and 1ms Response Time for $750 (members only).
They had these at our local Costco when we went in to buy groceries the other day. I am hoping to put together a desktop for flight simulation sometime soon.
I’m sure that folks that have become gaming combat Aces when faced with real high G forces flying actual aircraft and facing the possibility of being killed will all become real combat Aces.
In the 1990s my brother was a “check airman” for a regional airline before he moved on to the majors. That meant that he gave other pilots their periodic check rides. The simulator that the airline leased was near SeaTac airport. It was huge and was mounted up on giant hydraulic cylinders that could make it move violently during a simulation. I believe that it cost as much or more than the actual Metroliner commuter aircraft that it simulated.
I was fortunate enough to be able to sit at the controls in the cockpit of this simulator and fly it during time slots when my brother had no one scheduled while he was on duty.
But, no even that is not the same as the real thing. And the author who wrote this article 18 years ago was worried about gaming simulators from that time period changing the balance of power.
I have 34 curved Dell monitor at the office that I got for evaluation and love it.
Previously I had dual 27s.
Hard to look at them now.
Last year I bought a 32 curved Dell monitor for myself.
It’s plenty but I wouldn’t mind dual monitors.
Edwin A. Link would be thrilled at the advances made in processing, graphics and realism. He was a genius, the fact that he used the Organ Bellows principles to simulate roll, pitch and yaw was brilliant. He had a Theatre Organ in his home, sadly destroyed in the floods of 2011.
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