Land Warfare - Simulation: By air to battle - virtually | ADM Oct 08

Training Special Forces operators in the techniques of military freefall and High Altitude High Open (HAHO) parachuting can be expensive and dangerous, but is a necessary investment. A new simulation system can help contain costs, reduce risks to expensively trained troops, and help increase proficiency.
Gregor Ferguson

Military parachuting has changed enormously since the mass drops of World War II, and so has parachute training as a result.

Parachutes are used today principally by two main groups: aircrew, when they eject from a downed aircraft; and airborne forces (more often than not Special Forces) undertaking rare and therefore critical operations with little or no margin for failure.

The former group tends not to undertake parachute training as this is an unnecessary hazard while the latter need training to a level simply not available in traditional military parachuting schools.

A California company has developed a solution to satisfy the needs of both groups.

Systems Technology Inc has developed a Virtual Reality (VR) PARASIM parachute simulation system designed to teach a parachutist the necessary aircraft exit, flight and pre-landing skills.

A deployable version of the PARASIM was set up at the SimTecT 2008 trade show in Melbourne in May this year.

Systems Technology Inc is represented in Australia by Pacific Dynamics, a division of Melbourne-based Defcon Technologies.

Traditional parachute training focuses on procedures in the aircraft, and then drilling students in the techniques of aircraft exits and parachute landing falls.

It rarely, even now, focuses on canopy control in fight, particularly where groups of parachutists using steerable parachutes are required to steer towards the same confined drop zone.

The PARASIM system uses VR goggles and a head tracker to create a synthetic environment for a student hanging in a parachute harness under an A-frame.

The synthetic environment includes a full terrain model and, when the student looks up, an accurate representation of his canopy, harness and lift webs.

The simulator can generate canopy malfunctions and show the deployment (and possible malfunction also) of a reserve ‘chute.

Real meets synthetic

The integration of the synthetic environment with the real harness worn by the student extends to the operation of steering toggles and resulting deformation of the canopy in response to steering and braking commands.

The student’s VR field of vision is shown on the instructor’s station, along with other altitude, velocity and other data. Importantly, the system enables several PARASIM units to be networked, as at the Canadian Parachute Centre (CPC) at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Trenton.

This is important for both Special Forces or Pathfinder teams or, in the civilian world, for teams of smoke jumpers penetrating thick forest to fight wild fires.

The system has been acquired by US Special Operations Command as well as by the USAF for training fighter pilots, and by the Spanish Air Force’s Military Parachute School.

The company doesn’t claim that PARASIM replaces traditional methods – on the contrary, it emphasises that a paratrooper’s aircraft exit and landing skills must be taught properly and practiced relentlessly until these are intuitive and automatic.

But it does address the training problems created by the high-performance ram-air canopies used increasingly by Special Forces (and smoke jumpers) as well as the problems of carrying heavy mission loads or even a non-parachute trained mission specialist using a tandem harness and even larger ‘chute.

Bigger, faster canopies mean increased landing speeds, greater sensitivity to wind conditions and the need for fine judgement in estimating flare heights, wind speeds and rates of descent.

All of these things PARASIM addresses.

It also enables mission rehearsal and US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has funded the development of tools to enable the rapid preparation of terrain databases of potential drop zones and target areas, including prevailing wind and weather conditions, for this very purpose.

The basic PARASIM works on a stand-alone basis with a PC-based Instructor Station.

But 10 or more so-called Jump Stations can be networked through a central hub and controlled from a Master Controller station in a variety of configurations: 10 individual stand-alone stations; nine Jump Stations with one server; two groups of four parachutists with two servers; or other combinations.

Because the Jump Stations are deployable, and the Master Controller/Instructor Stations are PC-based, they can be set up close to a mounting base prior to an airborne operation.

While the PARASIM plays a useful role preparing operators for HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) descents, it has an equally important role preparing operators for HAHO (High Opening) descents.

HALO jumpers are generally dropped close to the DZ and so the difficulties of steering towards it once the canopy is flying are far less than for HAHO jumpers who may deploy their ram air canopies at altitudes of 25,000 feet or more, tracking across country for a considerable distance before reaching their DZ.

The PARASIM system interfaces with HAHO mission planning and navigation tools used by a number of HAHO operators: the OPANAS (Operational Parachute Navigation System), which employs a GPS, altimeter and magnetic compass to provide positional information and steering cues for the parachutist based on pre-jump data inputs.

A Mission Management Planner (MMP) developed by the same company that manufactures OPANAS, SSK Industries, runs on a PC to enable mission planning: the operator can input target coordinates an elevation, forecast wind data, canopy performance and the weight of the parachutist and equipment.

The MMP then calculates a release point for the parachutist, and the MMP is used to program the OPANAS.

Keeping costs down

Because training for such missions is expensive and logistically challenging, STI and SSK Industries have integrated OPANAS and MMP with the PARASIM to enable HAHO parachutists to fly simulated missions using realistic meteorological and terrain data and real-world OPANAS equipment.

The OPANAS system can also be networked to show a group of HAHO parachutists the relative positions of each member vital when descending through cloud or at night. This, too, can be simulated using PARASIM.

While the potential application of PARSIM are very wide, the real benefits, both operational and financial, are derived from its ability to simulate and prepare operators for critical and highly complex airborne insertions.

For that reason the SOCOM community worldwide has been looking at the system very closely; and the military aircrew community is benefiting from the technology technologies which have emerged from this program.