BAE and Red 6 introduce augmented reality for Hawk aircraft

I/ITSEC NEWS: Red 6 and BAE introduce augmented reality for Hawk aircraft

Red illustration 6

Orlando Florida — Pilots training on BAE Systems Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer aircraft will now be able to see things that don’t exist.

BAE and Red 6 have announced a new collaboration to integrate the latter’s Advanced Tactical Augmented Reality Systems, or ATARS, onto the Hawk platform. It will allow pilots to see virtual adversaries and threats during live training flights. The two companies made the announcement at the National Training and Simulation Association’s annual Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education conference in Orlando. The NTSA is affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association.

The Red Hawk has been flying in the UK for nearly 50 years, said Lucy Walton, BAE Systems Aviation Sector Training Manager. “We’ve really moved from analog cockpits to digital, and it’s the technology that Red 6 brings that we can start looking at how to continue to evolve what this platform is capable of doing, that’s exactly why we’re collaborating with Red 6.”

BAE trains more than 450 pilots a year, and time, cost and performance are the most critical metrics, she said.

“I don’t think there’s an air force in the world that you could talk to right now that wouldn’t tell you they want to push their pilots faster, or more pilots they want to push through. the system,” she said. . “So with the AR capability of the platform, instead of having to launch three live assets, I can now launch one live asset and have two augmented reality wingers and do this training.”

This reduces the logistics and costs of launching additional red forces and allows more pilots to be trained with the same time and funding, she said.

ATARS can replicate friendly and enemy aircraft and even incoming missiles, said Red 6 CEO Daniel Thompson, who flew Raptors in the UK and then F-22s with the US Air Force.

“When I was flying Raptors, what I always lamented was that if I wasn’t teaching on that plane…I’d say 60-70% of my time was pretending to be a bad guy,” did he declare. “For the layman on the pitch who looks like two people in training. The reality is that only one person gets trained because we’re doing something we would never do for real, so it’s actually negative training.

When he came to the United States and flew F-22s, he found there were similar difficulties in getting enough training. The limiting factors were the same, not enough planes, not enough pilots and not enough money, he said.

“Essentially the problem I wanted to solve was the ability to practice relevance against peer adversaries, and even with the F-22 it’s getting harder and harder to do that,” he said. .

Bringing virtual reality into actual flight was the logical solution and one that the market had yet to figure out, he said. “Augmented reality is really hard to produce the level of brightness and resolution with a wide enough field of view to make it work,” Robinson said on the sidelines of the conference.

“We’ve produced the most capable AR headset in the world,” he said. “And through that we’re able to do augmented reality on the visor of the helmet, but oh by the way, a side effect of that is we’re also doing all the helmet-mounted tracking stuff…so that’s really is custom optics and tracking solutions that make the technology work.

Orlando-based Red 6 has also worked with Boeing and the Air Force to integrate ATARS on the T-7, F-15EX and T-38, he said.

“Essentially, the fundamental architecture of the technology from day one was built and designed to be platform independent,” he said, noting that ATARS is an optical system that can work with no any helmet. “Then there is a degree of customization to make it work in terms of mission systems, available space, power systems, so we do that customization on a case-by-case basis.”

And the system allows training to be personalized based on each pilot’s abilities or shortcomings, he added.

“So augmented reality mitigates a lot of opportunity costs and wasted resources in pilot production because we’re able to tailor the training to the individual,” he said.

Topics: Training and Simulation