ORLANDO, Fla. — CAE and Rockwell Collins have joined forces to develop live, virtual, constructive training solutions.
The two companies announced the collaborative development agreement at the Interservice/Industry, Training, Simulation and Education Conference.
The training and simulation industry is trying to make integrated LVC more routine, and so Rockwell and CAE — often competitors — decided to work together to make it more commonplace, Gene Colabatistto, CAE’s group president for defense, told Defense News in an interview.
“That is part of the reason we announced this joint development and demonstration with Rockwell — to show that different technologies from each of the companies, different terrain-database formats, different systems can interoperate more routinely in a secure, seamless, interoperable environment,” said Chris Stellwag, a spokesman for CAE.
At the show, CAE and Rockwell are conducting several demonstrations of an integrated mission-training exercise “using fully connected LVC training elements,” according to a CAE statement.
The companies are connecting a live-flying, LVC-enabled L-29 aircraft simulated to be an F-18 fighter and operated by the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Laboratory, with a variety of virtual simulators and constructive forces to demonstrate an “integrated, joint, multi-dimensional mission training environment,” the statement reads.
Virtual blue force, or friendly, F/A-18 aircraft simulators and an E-2 aerial surveillance platform are being networked into the demonstration at the Rockwell Collins booth during the conference with Naval Combat System Simulators and remotely piloted aircraft desktop trainers at the CAE booth.
Constructive enemy and friendly forces will be “injected” into the live and virtual training systems during the demonstration to show “immersive” LVC training capabilities, according to CAE, and both companies will conduct distributed command-and-control tasks.
In the recent past, “the simple act of connecting my simulator to your simulator was not trivial,” Colabatistto told Defense News. “We had to work through technical challenges that had not been tackled before.”
The ability to set up demonstrations, to include the massive LVC exercise held at I/ITSEC every year called Operation Blended Warrior, is improving, he added.
Networking simulators and systems together for LVC training is also growing more important, which is why there is a distinct trend from recent years where the training and simulation industry’s focus was very device-oriented, Colabatistto said.
But now there is an increased interest in not just training a task, but training for specific missions — something for which the U.S. Army and the other services are directly requesting.
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Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
