5th gen training

The US alone has plans for as many as nine F-35 smaller training facilities and the second ITC is currently planned for Luke AFB in Arizona, while each partner nation including Australia is likely to establish its own training facilities as their indigenous F-35 capabilities ramp up. For the RAAF, this will be at Williamtown near Newcastle.

Australian Aviation recently visited Eglin AFB for a detailed briefing on the first ITC, and on what level of training the RAAF’s first F-35 instructor pilots and maintainers can expect when our first aircraft are delivered from late 2014.

Eglin Afb

Eglin AFB is located is Okaloosa County on the picturesque Florida Emerald Coast near the towns of Valparaiso and Fort Walton Beach.
The base was established in 1935 as the Valparaiso Bombing and Gunnery Base, and was renamed Eglin AFB in 1948. The base shares its two 3000x100m runways with the Northwest Florida Regional Airport which is served by several airlines with links to cities such as Dallas and Atlanta, but is not open to private or non-commercial operations.

The military reservation surrounding the base encompasses 749 square miles of range space on land which has 10 auxiliary airfields as well as the US Special Operations Command base at nearby Hurlburt Field, and restricted airspace blocks over land and the 340,000 km2 Eglin Gulf Test Range over the nearby Gulf of Mexico.

The base is perhaps best known for hosting the USAF’s Air Armament Center (AAC) and the 46th Test Wing which conducts the development, acquisition, testing, and deployment of all air-delivered weapons for the US and allied forces. Appropriately, the USAF Armaments Museum is located just outside Eglin’s main gate, and features examples of most US air launched weapons and many rare aircraft such as a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird.

Current environmental planning allows for 59 F-35s to be based at Eglin, and there are plans to increase this to as many as 108 aircraft if the training needs arise.

33rd FW

The 33rd Fighter Wing (FW) ‘Nomads’ has been designated as a joint graduate flying and maintenance training wing for the F-35 and falls under the USAF’s Air Education and Training Command’s 19th Air Force, and as such, is the first such joint unit in the US military.

The 33rd FW has been tasked to train F-35 pilots and maintainers on all three types for all three US services, as well as the initial cadres of trainers from JSF partner nations and FMS customers, and has been busy building new dedicated facilities and converting many older buildings for the expected annual throughput of 2000 maintainers and more than 100 pilots annually from 2014.

The leadership of the wing will be rotated between USAF, USN and USMC officers, and the unit is currently led by USAF Colonel David Hlatky, with USMC Colonel Arthur ‘Turbo’ Tomassetti as his deputy. Interestingly, COL Tomassetti, a decorated AV-8 Harrier pilot and graduate of the US Naval Test Pilot School, has been involved with the JSF program for almost a decade, and conducted the first supersonic flight and vertical landing of the X-35B proof of concept aircraft on a single flight at Edwards AFB back in 2002.

Within the 33rd FW’s structure are seven squadrons including the USAF’s 58th Fighter Squadron ‘Mighty Gorillas’ which will train F-35A CTOL pilots and maintainers, the USMC’s VMFAT-501 ‘Warlords’ which will train F-35B STOVL crews, and the USN’s VFA-101 ‘Grim Reapers’ which will train F-35C CV personnel. There are also four maintenance support squadrons within the 33rd’s umbrella which provide wing-level operational intelligence, weapons, tactics, aircrew flight equipment, training and scheduling support for the flying squadrons, aircraft maintenance, sortie generation, weapons loading, munitions operations and logistics integration.

In total, the wing will comprise more than 2000 personnel and 260 contractors when it reaches full strength in 2014.

Integrated Training Centre

The F-35 ITC at Eglin is an impressive facility, with a brand new training campus nearing completion along with dormitories, dining halls, shops and exercise facilities. It is envisaged that non-commissioned maintenance trainees will live on base in the dorms, while officer trainees will live in officer accommodation elsewhere on base or off-base.

“We have our headquarters facility on the main road, and then behind we have our university or campus,” Col Tomassetti told us. “We call it a campus because we have this large school house building, and we are bigger than some of the smaller colleges in the US as far as total square footage and facilities go. So we have an environment here that is conducive to student learning.”

The main building is more than 30,000 square metres in size, and comprises three main wings. The largest wing houses eight mission simulators, a 250-seat lecture theatre, and classrooms with other synthetic training devices. The middle wing houses the administration offices and more classrooms, while the third houses the maintenance training facilities including several full scale training devices.

While most of the infrastructure is new, many of the older buildings on base deemed suitable have been refurbished to make them F-35 compliant, including new environmental systems, parts and systems test facilities, and engine maintenance and test facilities. The ITC also has space for future growth, and the wing has plans and “blueprints” in place to accommodate future expansion should that be required.

Two huge new hangars have also been constructed; one for the Air Force squadron and one for the Navy/Marines, along a common theme but taking into account each of those services’ requirements. “The basic F-35 hangar here at Eglin is an I-shaped hangar with spaces in the vertical part of the ‘I’ to do maintenance on six aircraft simultaneously,” COL Tomassetti added. “There are office spaces, planning spaces and mission spaces for pilots and the operational part of the squadron on one side of the ‘I’, and maintenance spaces on the flight line side, and it’s an unbelievably nice facility by anybody’s standards. For the Navy and Marine hangar, we basically took two of the I-shaped hangars and jammed them together, and they share things like some common briefing rooms, an auditorium and a break room.”

The Navy hangar also has a fire suppression system that is common to US and most allied ships, and there is sufficient space along the flight line for another two hangars and associated facilities if they become necessary in the future.

Additional parking places, aircraft ‘carports’ and taxiways have been built, along with two STOVL pads and additional fuel and other support facilities. A ‘dummy deck’ representing an amphibious LHA ship deck will be built at nearby Duke Field for F-35Bs to practice their ship landing and takeoff procedures.

“We expect to start working out of the new facilities by the end of (northern) fall this year, and be up and operating by January next year,” said COL Tomassetti. “All of the airfield construction projects will be done by next (northern) summer, and we have options to work out of interim facilities should any of the construction work be delayed.”

Prior to the arrival of aircraft and students, all elements of the 33rd FW have been busy exercising the systems they plan to put in place, and as COL Tomassetti explained, at the time of our visit in late August they had just completed a series of ‘day-in-the-life’ exercises.

“We’re testing all the little pieces of the system in isolation,” he said. “And then with these ‘day in the life’ exercises, we put it all together to work out how a normal day might go. We’ve run that and we’ve seen where we need to do work, so we’re putting it all through the wringer. Then we’ll start to inject some of the ‘non-normal’ days where there might be a thunderstorm, or a hurricane nearby, or an aircraft mishap, so that we can exercise all those procedures that we hope we never have to turn to. No matter what happens with the delivery of the aircraft, we can’t do enough of this, and we learn something every time. The more we do this, the more ready we’ll be those aircraft arrive.”

Training

The way trainee pilots and maintainers who come to the ITC will be trained is very different to ‘legacy’ training programs. Instead of a bag of manuals and technical publications, all trainees will be given a laptop upon which will be loaded a new electronic training program.
“When I started flying, I was given about 60 pounds (30kg) of books and manuals. I went back to my room, took out publication number one, opened it to page number one, and started to read about learning how to fly airplanes,” said COL Tomassetti. “Then I went to class and the instructors taught me what was in the books, and somewhere after that I got into a simulator, and then sometime after that I got to fly an airplane.

“But here, we’ll hand the student a laptop, they’ll go into the classroom, and they won’t need an instructor for most things. They’ll learn by getting into the system and playing, and an electronic voice will walk them through the steps – it’s kinetic learning by touching and doing. While some of the courses will still be taught by an instructor, most of the course work the student will do is self-paced from a computer.”

But COL Tomassetti agrees that one challenge for the trainers will be how to amplify experience from what many would call a very dry learning environment. “We’re not talking about scanning a book in a PDF format and putting it on a computer screen. We’re talking about scenario type training, so there’ll be examples of how we did it in Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom, you can even put those scenarios on the electronic system. The maintainers will sit at a desk stop trainer, and they’ll have an avatar that will allow them to virtually pick up their virtual tool box, walk out to the virtual airplane, get out a virtual torque wrench and open a virtual panel. You’ll still have to eventually get in there for real and get dirty, but you’ll be able to practice it on the computer a few times first.”

Both pilots and maintainers will gain experience on more traditional simulator devices as well. For pilots there are mission rehearsal trainers which are representative cockpits with a few screens, and there are the full mission simulators in domes with full 360 degree views. The maintainers will also have full scale maintenance training devices where they can practice removing ejection seats and canopies, or loading and unloading weapons, or opening doors and panels on the airframe. These devices can train all three versions of the aircraft, as they have an F-35A/B wing and F-35B weapons bay on one side, and an F-35C wing and F-35A/C weapons bay on the other.

“All the training will be taken care of by the training management system,” added COL Tomassetti. “It will do the scheduling, the courseware delivery, the tracking of students’ progress, and the rating of quizzes, and that all sits inside the Autonomic Logistics Information Systems, or ALIS network which is the IT support network for the F-35 weapons system. This has been set up to be a truly paperless system, not as in less paper, but no paper.

“It will be a lot for the students to digest, but the beauty of this is that the way they’re going to learn is going to set them up for success. This has got to be good, because when we send a student out to the airplane for the first time, they’re going solo on the first day because there are no two seat airplanes.”

Integrated Learning

The ultimate goal of the ITC is to provide as much common training for all pilots and maintainers who come through the facility, and therefore as little variant, service, or country specific training as possible. The ITC will provide a common baseline of integrated training for all operators where the functions of all variants and operators are common.

“What the plan is we’ll always allow for variant specific, service specific, country specific top off training,” COL Tomassetti said. “But we’ll have a common baseline training which everyone gets, and then if somebody’s got to go down a separate path, then we’ll try to accommodate that. For example, I can’t tell you for sure how things are going to work for the Australian pilots and maintainers, it depends on where airplanes end up and none of the agreements are stamped and filed yet. But what I can tell you is, whoever comes here is going to go through this process – this is where we come back to this commonality thing. Doing co-located is very easy, but doing integrated is hard!”

The first group of international trainees will come from the UK, and the first of these should arrive at Eglin by the end of this year and be followed by the first UK aircraft in the fourth quarter of 2011. It is unclear whether any Australian F-35s will go to Eglin (or be held in storage or based elsewhere until they are brought to Australia in the 2017 timeframe), although it seems unlikely unless the 59 aircraft currently allocated to the base is increased.

Down the track, it is quite reasonable to expect pilots and maintainers from multiple services and countries attending lectures or doing course work at the same time in the same classroom.

Air 5428 Ramifications

It’s clear the electronic training system being established at Eglin (or whatever base the RAAF ends up training at) has direct ramifications for the ADF’s Project Air 5428 fixed wing training scheme which is due to enter service from the late 20-teens. No longer can the broader goal of the fixed wing training system be to turn out just a pilot, but an F-35 pilot must be the ultimate goal. This, the ab initio, advanced and lead in fighter systems will need to look as much like that being established for the F-35 as possible in order to realise that goal as seamlessly as possible.

For the RAAF, this will mean less reliance on paper publications and manuals, and much greater self-learning and simulation, so any thoughts of a simple one-for-one replacement of the current platforms will need to be seriously re-examined.