KAREN WALKER / DALLAS
PC-based Tropos system becomes company's standard simulator offering
CAE has unveiled its new Tropos image generator, the first PC-based visual system for Level D commercial flight simulators. The Canadian company demonstrated the system to airline delegates at the World Airline Training Conference in Dallas, Texas, earlier this month. Taiwan's EVA Air will be first airline customer, for an Airbus A330 CAE-built full-flight simulator.
Tropos becomes CAE's new standard visual offering, replacing Maxvue, launched in 1992, which will no longer be marketed. The company aims to increase its civil market share from the 59% of competed commercial visuals claimed for fiscal year 2001.
Tropos represents a commercial simulation breakthrough as the first image generator based on commercially available graphics processors meeting the highest regulatory standards. CAE has partnered Canadian company ATI Technologies, a PC graphics chip specialist.
CAE director of engineering, visual systems, Philippe Perey says the exponential increase in commercial graphics capability and escalating cost of upgrades for Maxvue drove the launch of Tropos. "The technology was quite promising, and the costs of making Maxvue more dense were becoming extravagant. We saw it as time to make a bold move into commodity graphics."
Tropos offers calligraphic capability - critical to meeting Level D standards - while the more than 250 airports in CAE's database library remain compatible with the new system. It also increases pixels per channel by 20% and polygons per channel by 60%, as well as doubling texture memory.
CAE emphasises the lower cost of ownership expected from Tropos. This is likely to be an important factor for CAE itself, which is rapidly enlarging its training services business and becoming a major operator of its own systems.
Chief visuals rival Evans & Sutherland (E&S) is also working with ATI on developing PC-based visual systems. But an E&S source says the company intends to apply the new technology only to military visual systems because of the high reliability demanded in commercial airline training.
FlightSafety International, meanwhile, has begun installing its latest Vital 9 visual on commercial simulators at its training centres worldwide. Although not a PC-based system, Vital 9harnesses significant advances in computer power to make the system both more realistic and easier to maintain.
Source: Flight International
