The Navy T-45 Trainer System (T45-TS) will expand the role of Visual Flight Rule (VFR) training in simulators to increase cost effectiveness of the overall Student Naval Aviator (SNA) program. While today's simulator visual technology can support training beyond field take off and landing to include introductions to carrier landing, weapon delivery, formation flight and low level navigation, it must be achieved with lower life cycle cost trainers than those supporting fleet aircraft. Lower cost technologies must be examined but reductions in the trainer's capabilities from proven training effective approaches must be validated through training evaluation. If achieving trainer cost goals leads to loss of training effectiveness, the low cost trainer may be the most costly to the training program. The Navy is applying inhouse as well as contractor resources in a research and evaluation program to meet this goal of defining an affordable training effective T-45 simulator visual system. Specific training tasks such as weapon delivery, carrier landing and formation flight normally requiring higher cost simulator implementations are being investigated in a series of training transfer experiments. The high cost equipment factors of display field of view size and type of scene content (i.e., dusk versus day) for SNA training are the principal research issues. The findings from current training experiments and planned evaluations to provide inputs to complete the guidelines are presented.

Carrier landing training of some 90 SNA's under simulator conditions of day or night, wide or narrow angle displays, and part or whole task training are compared with non-simulator trained pilots by evaluating their subsequent field carrier landing and carrier landing performance in the T2C aircraft. Thirty degree dive bomb training of SNA's will be evaluated under simulator conditions of day or dusk and alternate field of view arrangements and evaluated by their subsequent TA4J aircraft performance of this task.