Few people are aware of it, but a major crisis strikes a military base in rural Oxfordshire twice a month, forcing the UK Royal Air Force to organise a swift response involving up to six transport helicopters and dozens of personnel.
Flight International was granted exclusive access to a recent incident, during which a hostile invasion force launched an assault on a sparsely populated region of south-west England. News of the event has been slow to filter out, but this is usually the case with the little-known series of “Thursday War” exercises that take place every two to three weeks at RAF Benson, home to the UK’s fleets of Aerospatiale/Westland Puma HC1 and AgustaWestland EH101 Merlin HC3 utility helicopters.
Key challenge
The recent crisis involved no live aircraft movements. Instead it took place in the virtual realm using four dynamic motion simulators. But, for the aircrews involved, the event was taken as seriously as a frontline operation and its lessons will be of career-forming – and potentially even life-saving – importance.
Gone are the days when formations of large, expensive and noisy transport and attack helicopters could be used for large-scale manoeuvres over long distances, at low level and often by dead of night in the UK, due to a mix of financial, operational and environmental constraints. This poses a key challenge for the RAF and the other UK armed services: how to follow the modern mantra to “train like you fight”. This puzzle is increasingly being solved across the fixed-wing and helicopter communities through the use of synthetic training systems capable of delivering the quality of immersive training needed to ensure that aircrews are ready for the challenges faced in operational theatres such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and within the UK.
Conducted at the CAE Aircrew Training Services (ATS)-run Medium Support Helicopter Aircrew Training Facility (MSHATF) at Benson, the exercise involved the networked operation of four of the school’s six simulators. Crews were required to plan and execute a complicated mission to counter the invasion force and overcome a range of operating challenges that would be hard to replicate under peacetime conditions. Commanded by a young Boeing CH-47 Chinook HC2 pilot, the day-long resupply and fire-support exercise started with a mission planning briefing, progressed into a flight phase of roughly four hours and concluded with a detailed debriefing conducted in the site’s tactical control centre (TCC).
Each Thursday War is planned and headed by a mission commander who is deemed competent for the role or who would learn from the experience. To strengthen the collective nature of the training, the missions are flown with the helicopter’s rear crew and tactics instructors also taking part in the simulator.
The exercise was conducted with four aircraft operating in two-ship formations of one Chinook and one Merlin each. The operation also involved 140 other virtual players, ranging from a Boeing E-3D Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft and additional transport and British Army Boeing/Westland WAH-64 Apache AH1 attack helicopters to hostile threats including MiG-29 fighters. Other simulated entities included numerous armoured vehicles, ground troops, fuel caches and under-slung loads for delivery by the Chinooks and Merlins.
MiG-29 encounter
The aircraft started the exercise by conducting a trooplift of 120 personnel before transporting ammunition and other supplies to support manoeuvres of the Apaches and the use of army 155mm artillery pieces. The aircraft were also placed on standby for the duration of the operation to conduct combat search-and-rescue tasks if called on by a mission controller. All flight activities took place at altitudes of 50-200ft (15-60m) to segregate the helicopters from fast-jet movements. Incidents recorded during the exercise included an encounter with a MiG-29, manoeuvres to avoid surface-to-air missile threats and aircraft coming under artillery fire during the delivery of equipment to a landing zone.
“The exercise recreates a theatre of war, with all levels of friendly, hostile and neutral activity,” says Gordon Woolley, who manages the Serco-staffed TCC. “We replicate just what the crews would do in war. All the air tasking orders are framed in the same way and they co-ordinate their calls and actions as in the real world.” The RAF is responsible for outlining the scope of each exercise, with Wg Cdr Arthur Bennett serving as the interface between the CAE-run site, the UK’s Joint Helicopter Command (JHC) and the squadrons that allocate personnel to take part. Experienced officers from the air force’s support helicopter community are also involved in managing each exercise – which is drawn from six prepared missions – from a command position within the TCC.
The simulators at the site are employed for basic skills, routine and cockpit procedures training plus electronic-warfare instruction and use Evans & Sutherland Harmony image generators. Although it has been the subject of past development delays, Harmony is now “virtually there in delivering full functionality”, says CAE ATS marketing manager Paul Abraham, who adds that occasional software updates are still taking place.
Previous iterations of the Thursday War have tested the school’s maximum capacity by using all six of the simulators installed at the MSHATF. Two each are configured for the Chinook HC2 and Merlin HC3, one for the Puma and the other to replicate the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s CH-47SD configuration. One of the UK-specification CH-47 simulators can also be reconfigured with a Chinook HC3-standard cockpit, although the RAF’s eight aircraft of this type are currently unserviceable due to certification problems.
CAE ATS has a long-term agreement in place to provide simulator-based training for Dutch Chinook crews at the Benson facility ahead of national deployments to Afghanistan. The Royal Netherlands Air Force has crashed two of its CH-47SDs in the country this year, in addition to an Apache. Dutch crews have taken part in earlier Thursday War manoeuvres and CAE hopes to extend this agreement.
Beyond the basic concept of promoting good airmanship among crews by treating simulator flights in the same manner as real sorties, the Thursday War approach also meets a JHC objective of providing immersive training. However, simulator-based training activities can provide a second chance in the event of an accident, leaving crews more mocked than mourned. While crashes do occasionally occur during the Thursday Wars, these can be due to a simulator characteristic that freezes an individual simulator if any part of the aircraft comes close to striking a hazard. For example, a blade tip strike – which would cause only cosmetic damage to a rotor – is enough to halt a simulated mission and drive home the lesson of the fine margin between success and failure during a combat mission. Such training activities are highly valued ahead of operational deployments such as the RAF’s current detachment of seven of 28 Sqn’s 22 Merlin HC3s to Iraq. “The ethos of working with simulators has grown up with the Merlin,” says Bennett.
Seven training databases are available for use during activities at MSHATF, with these representing conditions in Northern Ireland, central England, northern Europe, Norway, Oman, the Falkland Islands and Belize. Dutch Chinook crews currently train partly using a tuned version of the Norwegian database, which is intended to match the temperature and humidity experienced in Afghanistan. A new Thursday War training scenario involving Merlins and Pumas in Iraq is being prepared, along with a basic Afghan visual database that will combine elements of the Norwegian and Omani libraries.
Realistic resolution
Resolutions vary in scale, but areas of the central England database provide a resolution of 1:50,000, enabling crews to realistically practise “low and slow” skills such as deploying with under-slung loads. Serving crews also speak highly of the realism provided by the simulators when using night-vision goggles – a regular requirement for deployed operations.
“There are no wrong or right answers” to how the mission commander should conduct the exercise, says Woolley, who adds: “We rarely have two guys take the same approach.” The debrief process is used to provide largely constructive criticism, as Bennett notes: “Our aim is not to break the aircrews; it is to develop them”. Some of the RAF’s support helicopter crews will participate in three or four Thursday Wars per year, and after around nine months in conversion the crews will typically be deployed to forward operating locations.
The long-term prospects for facilities such as MSHATF appear to be bright. The school is currently contracted to run until 2017, with the JHC to make a decision by 2015 on its continuation plan for support helicopter training. n
Up to six simulators are used during each Thursday War
Training through collective action on networked sites
The UK Ministry of Defence is looking to widen its use of synthetic team and collective training devices, and recently selected Qinetiq to conduct concept demonstrations and trials under a mission training through distributed simulation (MTDS) study.
The decision to launch the £10 million ($17 million) programme was driven in part by the Royal Air Force’s involvement in NATO’s First Warfighter Alliance in a Virtual Environment (First WAVE) exercise last year and was supported by the quality of training being delivered by its locally networked systems. These include the BAE Systems-run Hawk Synthetic Training site at RAF Valley, the CAE Aircrew Training Services-managed Medium Support Helicopter Aircrew Training Facility at RAF Benson and additional assets such as the Thales-run Panavia Tornado GR4 Synthetic Training Service at Lossiemouth and Marham.
Co-ordinated from RAF Lossiemouth, the First Wave exercise involved operations of simulated fighter and reconnaissance aircraft from seven allied nations, and marked the first time that the base’s two full-mission simulators had been networked to external systems via a wide area network (Flight International, 30 November-6 December 2004). It is in this area of training that the MoD believes the UK will benefit in the future, via the ability to conduct large-scale synthetic exercises by linking simulators located at numerous sites around the country. To conclude in early 2008, the MTDS effort should prove the potential of delivering improved collective training and, the MoD hopes, better prepare its armed forces for the large-scale, high-intensity operations it can now rarely afford to train for during peacetime.
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Source: Flight International
