On the basis of the Virtalis Group’s track record in aerospace maintenance projects and experience in defence human factors, it was subcontracted to develop the avionics training simulator for the Tornado Maintenance School (TMS) at RAF Marham. As with many other applications in the military sector, gaining access to appropriate hardware for maintenance training, be it a complete aircraft or even individual functional components (known as Line Replaceable Units, or LRUs), can never be completely guaranteed, given the demanding defence and policing duties performed by RAF Tornado squadrons across Europe and further afield.

The Solution
The VR system is hosted on a high-specification Windows NT system and, uniquely, features three screens per workstation, each displaying different working views of the aircraft, avionics bays, LRUs and fully functional test equipment. Ten workstations were produced, fully networked, allowing up to eight students to be trained and supervised simultaneously by two instructors in basic and advanced Tornado F3 avionics maintenance routines, with collaboration between students supported over the local area network as necessary.

As well as the virtual aircraft shell itself, around which students are free to move, all moving surfaces are present (removable and hinged panels, fl ight control surfaces and radome), as are internal and external aircraft systems connector points. Full cockpit detail and functionality has also been delivered for both the pilot and navigator positions. To produce this level of visual and interactive fidelity, five of VP Defence’s developers spent an entire week creating digital still and video footage, plus some 1,300 film images of an F3 Tornado. The images were also used in conjunction with 3D drawings, again constructed by the VP Defence team (in the absence of any CAD data) to construct a faithful VR representation of the aircraft shell. Over 450 LRUs feature in the simulation, located in equipment bays around the aircraft and as control and display units within the cockpit. Once the TMS trainers have programmed individual faults or sequences of faults, the students can explore the aircraft, opening hinged panels and selecting LRUs for removal, inspection and test using any of around 50 additional virtual test sets. Every control input made by the trainee results in a realistic and accurate change of state within the virtual Tornado, be it the movement of external flight surfaces, down to the illumination of, individual LRU/test indicators.



Operational results
In contrast to previous hardware and CBT-based training facilities at TMS (the main facility based on physical cockpit mock-ups costing over £14 million), ATF has, since its operational debut in 1999, reduced training time from 13 to 9 weeks and downtime – time in which the waiting students do nothing – from three to zero weeks. The TMS Marham trainers believe the course could be shortened even further, but are reluctant to do so, choosing instead to increase course content and promote retention through “consolidation breaks” and extra-mural self-pace refresh trials). Feedback from the Marham trainers is that, in contrast to previous courses, ATF students “grasp the concept” (ie. gain enhanced spatial In contrast to previous hardware and CBT-based training facilities at TMS (the main and procedural knowledge) up to 40% faster than achieved previously by non-ATF students. The modified Tornado F2 rig, as used by the GR4 course students, is still considered to be important in order to deliver health and safety training associated with lifting procedures for some of the heavier LRUs, for example. Of particular interest is the cost of the ATF facility - in total this amounted to just over a tenth of the cost of previous non-VR set-ups.

Future Opportunities
With only a limited future lifespan, no further expenditure is scheduled for the skills and experiences gained by VP Defence during this project are ideally suited for any sizeable and/or complex vehicles, plant and machinery, be they in the military environment or the commercial sector. The existence of appropriate CAD data would make any future project quicker to develop, test and implement, although, as demonstrated above, lack of such data is not insurmountable.