Posted on 01/17/2006 3:56:44 PM PST by spetznaz
January 17, 2006: 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.
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.
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.
With that said, this development will improve the skillsets of their pilots. However improved skills or not they should not think themselves able to go kiss-kiss with a Raptor.
Nonsense.
Waste of words this is....
You can't fight what you can't see: RAPTORS
Enough Said.
BTTT
Provided we deploy Raptors in sufficient numbers that will be true.
If Hillary or some other Dem gets into the Presidency, it won't.
You are right. AS a retired AF pilot I can sau this is baloney!
Aw come on...are you series???
Complete nonsense. How many G's does a flight-sim pull?
I work in the defense simulator community myself. This is complete B.S.
Cheap machines is one thing. Software that works well for it is completely something else.
In addition, it works both ways. Cheap simulators mean that much more training time for our guys as well.
An ejection simulator will likely prove more useful.
one?
Pilots are so 20th century anyway. UAVs are the future.
Funny.
As you know, there are massive fidelity issues with PC based trainers.
We used to have an advantage both in technology and in training. Now it seems like the advantage in the training has decreased tremendously. There is no guarantee that the advantage in technology will continue to be there. We didn't beat the Soviets because we had better engineers. We beat them because we had a better economy. The Chinese economy seems to be doing quite well.
Even grossly outnumbered, a USAF Raptor has an overwhelming advantage over anything else that will be built by anyone for decades. I've read that a lone F-22 can routinely win a mock air combat mission against six USAF F-15s. The problem is that they're very expensive, and Congress keeps buying fewer of them (making the per-unit price that much more expensive). So F-15s, F-16s, Navy F/A-18s, and the "super-compromise" F-35 are going to be more prevalent.
They're still fantastic fighters, but they may not maintain overwhelming superiority against an equivalent number of well-trained pilots in SU-37s or Rafales.
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