• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

VR Simulators at Whiting

Dontcallmegump

Well-Known Member
pilot
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/N...y-experiences-flight-training-in-south-texas/

For anyone currently in primary, or waiting to start, have you heard anything about this new Project Avenger syllabus? If it utilizes the VR sims, I really hope they made some drastic changes, because those things were pretty awful last year.

Nothing beyond observations, but they put up maybe 8-10 new VR set ups that have a similar look as the old ones, with obviously upgraded components (50ish inch TV displays, more computer hardware, similar looking controls etc.) in the Corpus sim bay. They've even got students with "avenger" patches, half vt-27, half vt-28 logos, running around doing seemingly normal primary contacts sims and studying.
 

PMPT

Well-Known Member
The VR "sims" suck. Don't bother using them. A much better use of your time is learning the checklists and hollywood in the static trainers.

They fly a lot different from the actual airplane or the real sims, and the FMS in the VR sim doesn't actually work so you really can't even work on instrument stuff.

in all fairness though, they can be useful for getting the visuals for course rules etc. but that's really about it for the most part. I think the value and utility of these in their present existence is vastly overestimated by TPTB.
 

Dontcallmegump

Well-Known Member
pilot
in all fairness though, they can be useful for getting the visuals for course rules etc. but that's really about it for the most part. I think the value and utility of these in their present existence is vastly overestimated by TPTB.

Google earth is the way to chairfly that, you can zoom to the altitudes you'll be flying at and IIRC even add in angles so the viewpoint isn't stright down, but more like the perspective approaching the point. The resolution is good enough to train your eyes what to look for and is useful for identifying any ground check points: course rules, how to join, runwy initials, hell even what the 180/90/spacing looks like from every runway OLF or home.

Throw in practicing the radio calls and every other action and verbal and thats about as good as it gets outside a FTD or some obsessive level home flight sim.
 

wlawr005

Well-Known Member
pilot
Contributor
Project Avenger is a full-blown fundamental change to how we conduct flight school in order to decrease cost and time to train. In addition to the VR stuff, there are preliminary inquiries into implementing strike fighter software into the T-6B and using that airplane in conjunction with the T-45C in intermediate and advanced strike training.

We have two trainers in Meridian. They don't yet do all the things they are supposed to do, but there are a lot of VTCs about them.

Personally, I'd rather just get new white boards, models that don't suck, and a reliable way to debrief HUD footage.
 

AllYourBass

I'm okay with the events unfolding currently
pilot
We're all laser-focused on building new-age, game-changing training equipment for students, but here's my gripe about the MH-60R community that won't be fixed by VR (or any new tech, since we aren't utilizing the great tech we have now).

I have been in the community since 2015 and I have never, ever been shown how to perform a particular skill by someone who is already competent at the skill (except for the time I sandbagged a SWTI's ASW TACEVAL by chance, which happened a year ago). For all the incredibly competent minds at NAWDC and the Weapons Schools, nobody has leveraged the incredible power of the recording software in our TOFTs to pass that ability on.

Solution: Create training videos that students can watch so that they can learn what comms should sound like, how SCAR/ASW/weapons release should be conducted, etc.

Throw all the studs you want into whatever VR scenarios you can create, but they'll still just be a shitty student performing shittily based on their best guess at what the pubs/PowerPoints/classroom settings were describing is the correct way to do things. Alternatively, let that student watch a video on the training LAN of a couple Level 5s expanding a sonobuoy pattern and I'll bet they'll actually figure it out.

I hope the other communities are different. I'm told jet studs don't even brief until they've watched jet pilots brief a thousand times so that they know how to conduct themselves during a brief. There is nothing like that in the MH-60R community AT. PERIOD. ALL.
 

wlawr005

Well-Known Member
pilot
Contributor
Part of Avenger is using a 360 camera and other equipment to record audio and video of each particular stage of flight training from the viewpoint of the flying pilot's eyeballs. The sorties are flown by STAN IPs and then uploaded to YouTube for the time being. Meridian is still working on ours.


As far as briefing goes, read Chapter 1 of the TOPGUN manual.
 

Gatordev

Well-Known Member
pilot
Site Admin
Contributor
We're all laser-focused on building new-age, game-changing training equipment for students, but here's my gripe about the MH-60R community that won't be fixed by VR (or any new tech, since we aren't utilizing the great tech we have now).

I have been in the community since 2015 and I have never, ever been shown how to perform a particular skill by someone who is already competent at the skill (except for the time I sandbagged a SWTI's ASW TACEVAL by chance, which happened a year ago). For all the incredibly competent minds at NAWDC and the Weapons Schools, nobody has leveraged the incredible power of the recording software in our TOFTs to pass that ability on.

Solution: Create training videos that students can watch so that they can learn what comms should sound like, how SCAR/ASW/weapons release should be conducted, etc.

Throw all the studs you want into whatever VR scenarios you can create, but they'll still just be a shitty student performing shittily based on their best guess at what the pubs/PowerPoints/classroom settings were describing is the correct way to do things. Alternatively, let that student watch a video on the training LAN of a couple Level 5s expanding a sonobuoy pattern and I'll bet they'll actually figure it out.

I hope the other communities are different. I'm told jet studs don't even brief until they've watched jet pilots brief a thousand times so that they know how to conduct themselves during a brief. There is nothing like that in the MH-60R community AT. PERIOD. ALL.

I always found the "Instruction" part of the SWTI concept to be lacking. That said, proper debrief tools has been in the Top 5 and Top 3 of the NARG list for several years (not sure where it is now, or if it's actually been funded now). The focus was on the aircraft, but if the software can push it out and the sims were able to accept the update after the last round of upgrades, it could be (and was desired to be) beneficial on the TOFT side, too.

While this doesn't address the relative simplicity and relative low cost of your request (just making a video for study, which makes sense), I have also noticed that use of the TOFT debrief software was varied. I don't really recall seeing it's use, even on LVL 4 checkrides at -41. The Mayport sims didn't use them very often, except maybe during Workups, but part of that was how Mayport sims were manned (limited CIS support) for fleet events, which resulted in less technological know-how by USN SWTI operators (despite what they claimed). Jax did a much better job, for several good reasons, but a big one was because they embraced the technology and then tried to improve it with CAE when they could. That's why Wing Training would try to push LOFTs and virtualized events to Jax, as the end product seem to be better for the fleet (and TOFT-6 was always a weirdo on the network).
 

Pags

N/A
pilot
We're all laser-focused on building new-age, game-changing training equipment for students, but here's my gripe about the MH-60R community that won't be fixed by VR (or any new tech, since we aren't utilizing the great tech we have now).

I have been in the community since 2015 and I have never, ever been shown how to perform a particular skill by someone who is already competent at the skill (except for the time I sandbagged a SWTI's ASW TACEVAL by chance, which happened a year ago). For all the incredibly competent minds at NAWDC and the Weapons Schools, nobody has leveraged the incredible power of the recording software in our TOFTs to pass that ability on.

Solution: Create training videos that students can watch so that they can learn what comms should sound like, how SCAR/ASW/weapons release should be conducted, etc.

Throw all the studs you want into whatever VR scenarios you can create, but they'll still just be a shitty student performing shittily based on their best guess at what the pubs/PowerPoints/classroom settings were describing is the correct way to do things. Alternatively, let that student watch a video on the training LAN of a couple Level 5s expanding a sonobuoy pattern and I'll bet they'll actually figure it out.

I hope the other communities are different. I'm told jet studs don't even brief until they've watched jet pilots brief a thousand times so that they know how to conduct themselves during a brief. There is nothing like that in the MH-60R community AT. PERIOD. ALL.
Boom! This is such a fantastic idea it's easy to ignore. But this should totally be a thing. There are a lot of things I've been a bit confused about but then watched a YouTube video and said, "oh! That's how you do it!"
 

Jim123

DD-214 in hand and I'm gonna party like it's 1998
pilot
Naval flight training used to have a lot of informative and useful training videos with a film reel on an old fashioned movie projector. A lot of those got transferred to VHS tapes or updated and put on VHS. You'd sign out a copy and watch it in one of the cubicles with a VCR, little TV, and headphones. Some of that stuff made it onto digital, but a lot of the digital age training turned into what we now know as CBTs, self-paced learning where you click on the next slide and the one after that, with little 30 second vignettes but mostly cut-and-paste text from one of the pubs.

About six or seven years ago some of the Whiting IPs put together some really great primary formation videos. Those are on YouTube and I'm pretty sure they're still an officially sanctioned "you really should watch this" part of the syllabus. They're well produced too, just the right amount of narration, little text boxes and arrows to emphasize visual checkpoints and what to look for or what step of the procedure the video is doing. It's a shame that these stand out as the exception rather than the rule.
 

AllYourBass

I'm okay with the events unfolding currently
pilot
Naval flight training used to have a lot of informative and useful training videos with a film reel on an old fashioned movie projector. A lot of those got transferred to VHS tapes or updated and put on VHS. You'd sign out a copy and watch it in one of the cubicles with a VCR, little TV, and headphones. Some of that stuff made it onto digital, but a lot of the digital age training turned into what we now know as CBTs, self-paced learning where you click on the next slide and the one after that, with little 30 second vignettes but mostly cut-and-paste text from one of the pubs.

About six or seven years ago some of the Whiting IPs put together some really great primary formation videos. Those are on YouTube and I'm pretty sure they're still an officially sanctioned "you really should watch this" part of the syllabus. They're well produced too, just the right amount of narration, little text boxes and arrows to emphasize visual checkpoints and what to look for or what step of the procedure the video is doing. It's a shame that these stand out as the exception rather than the rule.

You're thinking about the product that became www.t6bdriver.com.

It's changing the way I think about training at the FRS!
 
Top