The Eighth United States Army (EUSA) in the Republic of Korea employs UH-60 and CH-47 flight simulators to support individual and crew training for Blackhawk and Chinook pilots, respectively. These simulators are high fidelity, man-in-the-loop, training devices that support initial entry, qualification, and sustainment training in system operations, crew coordination, emergency procedures, and combat skills. As part of the EUSA Korean Simulator Upgrade program, the two flight simulators are receiving an upgrade to the visual image generation system (including a geo-specific database of the Korean Peninsula) while maintaining, as a minimum, existing performance capabilities. One of the key training areas to maintain was the tactical environment. In the existing visual database, target sites and pathways were modeled into the database manually, based on training requirements and customer inputs, using custom database generation tools. The sites and paths, along with the behaviors of these targets, were under instructor controls; thus, providing numerous, realistic, dynamic, yet deterministic and repeatable tactical scenarios. In addition to these real-time scenarios, both training devices provide a reset and playback capability that allows the student and instructor to review the mission and allows fly-out to real-time at any time during the playback. Under the scope of the contract, these capabilities were to be maintained.
The solution needed to be a constructive simulation that not only maintained previous tactical environment fidelity (critical to each helicopter's training environment) but one that added enough robustness to provide a set of routes that can be altered as training requirements change without requiring a large database modeling effort. With an off-line scenario generation capability and realistic target movement models, Modular Semi-Automated Forces (ModSAF) was selected as the constructive simulation. By adding a Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) network interface between the legacy device and ModSAF, the Instructor Operator Station (IOS) at the training device can control each ModSAF target as directed by the existing tactics within the legacy training device. The use of DIS as the interface also provides future growth potential for the devices to perform collective training in a DIS or High Level Architecture (HLA) networked environment.