At the 2016 Air Power Conference Cirrus managing director Peter Freed achieved the goal of every service provider – hearing his customer present to the assembly on how the strength of their relationship has produced better outcomes for all concerned.
Philip Smart | Adelaide
Cirrus provides the Royal Australian Air Force No. 1 Flying Training School’s (1FTS) Air Combat Officer Training System (ACOTS), a package of ground based and airborne emulation systems that immerse future RAAF Air Combat Officers (ACO) and RAN Aviation Warfare Officers (AvWO) in a simulated battlespace in a real aircraft.
Flying out of RAAF Base East Sale in Beech B350 King Air turboprop aircraft of 38 Squadron, trainee officers seated in the right hand cockpit seat or at consoles in the cabin learn and practise with systems and procedures representative of those they might one day put to use in an EA-18G Growler, P8 Poseidon or MH60R Romeo helicopter.
"Instead of everything being lawyers at 20 paces with arguments about scope, adversarial positions and all the rest of it, we have a cooperative approach to each other.”
The ACOTS system simulates various radars, combining real-time radar returns from ground features with synthetic contacts introduced as part of the training scenario. Students learn to recognise and handle the impacts of factors such as the quirks of radar beam physics, aircraft altitude, weather conditions, processing gain and terrain slope on the ability to detect contacts. They identify contacts, mark them into their tactical display system, accept off-board link contacts, transmit contacts off-platform and manage their own mission. Training can include low-level tactical fast-jet operations, maritime patrol and response operations and air battle management.
First fielded in 2011, ACOTS solves the conundrum of how to start training the future ACO or AvWO to effectively fight an advanced, highly valuable platform without taking that platform off-line to do so.
Peter Freed is proud of ACOTS, but believes a true development partnership with various Defence customers made it a better product.
“Instead of everything being lawyers at 20 paces with arguments about scope, adversarial positions and all the rest of it, we have a cooperative approach to each other,” he told ADM.
In practise, this ongoing relationship means both parties respect each other’s knowledge and experience and work together to develop ACOTS as a living project rather than carving every last requirement in stone beforehand.
According to the presentation that Group Captain Stephen Longbottom of the Royal Australian Air Force Training Group gave to the 2016 Air Power Conference in March, the practical manifestation of that respect included Cirrus not second-guessing the Commonwealth’s calls on functionality weightings, while the customer in turn refrained from listing every requirement as most important and avoided second guessing Cirrus’s engineering calls. The result is a successful project, delivering a cost-effective product that works, on time.
Globally competitive
“The technology now is as good as anything available on the global market for this space,” Freed said. “It hasn’t cost an arm and a leg and many adaptations our customer wanted have occurred. And it’s all happened fairly quickly.”
ACOTS has also spawned an export opportunity, with a system variant already acquired by Brunei and growing interest from other defence forces. Cirrus is particularly proud of the part task trainer developed as part of the package.
“It looks like a flight simulation device, but it’s actually for training the operator in the right hand seat of the cockpit, the person who’s there not to fly the plane but to conduct combat,” Freed said. “It allows that person to see the portion of the aircraft instruments that are relevant to that role, such as the navigational avionics. But it also allows them to access, via a modern ‘swipe, tap and pinch’ tablet application, all of the sensor and tactical picture compilation tools, so it simulates the radars and the optic sensors.”
But it hasn’t all been a Cinderella story for Cirrus; the ACOTS product grew out of a stark change in direction when the company’s original market segment evaporated with a change in Defence’s approach to acquisition. Freed started life in the defence industry making systems for advanced submarine acoustics before starting his own company in 1996 in what he now refers to as “a fit of youthful naivety”.
“I’d been working in a small Australian company building very high-tech sonar processing equipment,” he said. “And I guess being young I foolishly felt well I can do this better than my bosses, with very little appreciation for a lot of what my bosses at that company actually had accomplished. But that is the prism of youth, to not see the full picture.”
For a time, all went well. The new company worked on acoustic equipment for Australia’s Oberon submarines and later on augmentation of the original combat systems for Collins. But when Defence decided it would abandon a home grown Collins submarine combat system in favour of the American product, work dried up for Cirrus.
Transition time
It was change or die, and the company made the jump in to simulation systems, winning a contract to develop a simulator for Australia’s Minehunter sonar and associated tactical systems.
“That went very well,” said Freed. “And we did quite a few different projects, some related to major systems integration and some smaller technology developments for DSTO, all of which led to Cirrus gaining a broadened intellectual property base and a more diversified engineering capability.”
Then along came a Rapid Prototyping Development & Evaluation (RPDE) opportunity for the product that became ACOTS. By then, Freed was well aware of the key capabilities that had brought his company back from the brink and still win work today.
“One is the knowledge of how information may be extracted from data,” he said. “That is a scientific matter, but it underpins all sensor systems. The second is how to build robust software that responds to many things going on simultaneously.”
And although Freed believes small businesses have a flexibility and agility their larger counterparts may lack, they also need “big company” attitudes to engineering discipline and quality control to be credible.
“When many people think of small to medium enterprises they think yes, clever technically but lacking adequate engineering maturity. But Cirrus has operated under a formal quality system since 1998, and the Directorate General Technical Airworthiness has issued Cirrus an Authorised Engineering Organisation delegation under which Cirrus has developed the ACOTS software.
“We provide our customers with the best of both sides of that coin. You get the speed and technical expertise of a small outfit, coupled with the robust engineering rigour of an AEO. We’re an SME that knows what we’re doing for the serious stuff.”