The U.K. Ministry of Defense has pulsed industry for innovative ways to develop simulation and field trial ability to counter potential threats to military helicopters from ground-based man-in-the-loop (MITL) operated weapons.
The ministry aims to meet future requirements to assess how aircraft maneuvers, threat-warning systems and countermeasures can mitigate the effects of hostile fire from a range of weapon systems.
MoD scientists at the Defense Science and Technology Lab (Dstl) have showcased their current technology used for testing and evaluation. The demonstration brought user and industry together to develop ideas to overcome future test and evaluation challenges.
The scientists showed the Helicopter Countermeasure Assessment System (HCAS), which is a real-time MITL engagement model built on the Virtual Battle-Space 2 synthetic environment. It has two main system components: a weapons station using an imitation machine gun to engage a simulated target and a cockpit flight simulator that replicates basic helicopter controls.
A trained pilot using the cockpit simulator can react to realistic warning cues to maneuver a virtual helicopter in response to a threat. Various maneuvers can be tried in both the HCAS synthetic environment and during trials to find the optimum response to any hostile fire event.
DSTL is integrating validated ballistics and representative countermeasures into HCAS to improve the realism of simulated air-to-ground engagements.
Countermeasure concepts also need to be developed in the HCAS virtual environment and validated in a live flight scenario.
Weapons operator performance during field trials is currently assessed using military off-the-shelf-equipment, the Helicopter Collective Training System (HCTS), which can only be fitted to the Lynx Mk 7 helicopter produced by Westland, now subsumed under Finmeccanica‘s AgustaWestland.
However, the Lynx Mk7 is coming up on its going out of service date, and that equipment will be obsolete, so the MoD wants industry to consider how to replace and upgrade the existing capability.
This new capability should bring together the weapons operator, the Defensive Aid Suite (DAS) fitted aircraft, the aircrew and countermeasures.
Ian Pothecary of Dstl’s Countermeasure Concepts team said in a statement, “The challenge facing Dstl is how to conduct human performance trials of the aircrew and the threat operator without the need for live fire scenarios. Replicating these interactions in simulation, coupled with DAS, is vital to developing credible countermeasures. What we need from industry are ideas on how to overcome this challenge, for example, how do we appropriately simulate the weapon effects, how do we fuse the data from the weapon and aircraft correctly?”
Combining simulation and live trials will allow aircrew to develop more effective tactics, techniques and procedures if facing an attack. Squadron Leader James Birtwistle said: “The importance of simulation when testing new concepts is that it’s cheap, relative to live flying, easy to repeat and you have full control of the environment in which your testing takes place. Live flying is also important because the environment on a live aircraft is different from that in a lab–there are factors such as noise and vibration and there may well be others we might not know are an issue until we test something. Which is why to make sure something works properly, you have to do it on a real aircraft as well as in a lab.”