ORLANDO, Fla.—The Navy’s most advanced fighter jets can’t partake in a key aspect of modern tactical training: “injecting” distant or even imaginary aircraft into their systems so aviators can practice scenarios too difficult or costly to arrange in real life.
“The fact that we can get the F/A-18s, the EA-18s, and the E-2Ds all into the inject-to-live environment, and they can fight together on the range is fantastic,” Capt. Andrew Mariner, deputy commander of Naval Air Warfare Development Center, said at the I/ITSEC conference here last week. “But I bet you can guess who doesn’t play still: can’t get the F-35s to see the same thing synthetically that the rest of the air wing can see. So if I have F-35s at [Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada], they can’t play when I do the inject-to-live.”
That’s a problem. The Navy—along with the rest of the Pentagon—is increasingly relying on this kind of live-virtual-constructive training.
“The ability to inject constructive pictures into live aircraft in the air…it’s exploded,” said Chris Boyle, who directs LVC training and technology for Fleet Forces Command. “Last year, we flew 20,000 constructive sorties across the Navy. Think about it. Twenty thousand sorties were just constructively generated and pushed out into the air.”
Many of those sorties are “red air”—that is, the “enemy aircraft” that aviators fight in exercises. At Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, constructive sorties now account for about 80 percent of red air, Boyle said during a naval aviation panel.
But that doesn’t help F-35 aviators, who also have another problem that might be solved with LVC: their jet, with its speed, stealth, and specialized sensors, has capabilities that can’t be fully exercised in the U.S. military’s training ranges.
“The ranges just aren’t large enough. And that problem becomes compounded as the F-35 and other fifth-generation, more advanced platforms come on board because they’re faster, they have more capability, so it’s harder to train just in a live environment,” said Brian Bazil, vice president of business development for HII’s Mission Technologies.
There are workarounds. For example, F/A-18s stand in as red air, flying in front of the F-35s to “take care of a bunch of inject-to-live tracks,” Mariner said. “It’d be nice if I could get everybody into that inject-to-live environment and have them all see what the F/A-18s, EA-18s, and E-2D’s see.”
And the Navy is planning to roll out a stopgap solution next year. In January, a set of eight F-35 simulators is to be installed at Fallon’s Integrated Training Facility, which houses next-generation tactical aviation training-and-simulation systems for carrier air wings. Developed as the Effects Based Simulator, they are to reach initial operating capacity in March.
These simulators will run source code similar to that on the F-35 and are designed to yield the same outcome, said Derek Greer, the director of integrated battle space simulation and the test department at the Naval Air Warfare Center’s Aircraft Division.
“That’s kind of the near-term gap-filler for the F-35 at Fallon,” Greer said.
The better solution won’t be an upgrade that enables the Lightning II to accept constructive injections—at least, not yet. Instead, it’s another simulator, but a far better one.
JSE, incoming
By the end of 2025, Fallon is slated to get high-fidelity simulators that run the full Joint Simulation Environment, which offers the best representation of air threats and the electromagnetic spectrum anywhere, Greer said.
Aviators say JSE is the first sim that gives them “a true sense of fear,” JSE Director Blaine Summers told FlightGlobal earlier this year. “That’s because the threat representation is high quality. That F-35 operator is getting visible and audible warnings. They’re getting engaged with weapons. They’re getting punished if they make mistakes tactically.”
Right now, only one facility runs the full JSE sim—Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland—but it has already altered how F-35 pilots get their advanced training.
“All three service weapons schools”—like the Navy’s Topgun—“have changed their curriculum to bring their students to JSE. So they are bringing the students with the instructor pilots for a week of air-to-air [combat] and a week of air-to-surface [combat] as part of the curriculum,” Greer said.
And it’s not just U.S. aircrews. In the fiscal year that ended in September, 820 F-35 pilots from the U.S. and foreign militaries came to Pax River “to get the high-end-fight training in JSE, because they can’t get that anywhere else,” Greer said.
The Air Force is to get JSE installations next year: one at Edwards Air Force Base in California and two at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
All four new JSE sites will run independently but with the same software so pilots have the same training experience and threat performance.
The Navy is still working through the technical challenges of connecting the sites to enable distributed, real-time operations, Greer said.
The JSE generates “gobs and gobs and gobs of data that we cannot distribute over our networks in real time today,” Greer said. “With that said, all is not lost. We do think that there’s some technology challenges that we can overcome and get them connected in the future.”
Right now, the priority is adding more weapons, aircraft, and threat elements to the JSE program.
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