Thales modelling its future in simulation

Thales Training & Simulation aims to bring global resources to bear on local challenges - and feed local solutions into its parent company's global supply chain.
Thales Training and Simulation (TT&S), Australia's largest simulation house with more than 220 employees, has bolstered its capabilities with the commissioning of a battlespace transformation centre at its Sydney headquarters.

Dubbed the Australian Transformation and Innovation Centre (ATIC), the facility provides a simulation environment capable of incorporating thousands of entities, from individual soldiers to entire task forces.

Part of a network of 12 similar Thales centres elsewhere in the world, the ATIC will facilitate experimentation in the concept of operations for large tactical exercises and various aspects of Command and Control. The ATIC can operate in stand-alone mode, or can be linked in whole or part with its counterparts, incorporating data received from those simulators and from units and assets in the field, including Australia's new Tiger armed reconnaissance helicopters.

According to Elias Barakat, Thales Australia's Director of Operations Training and Simulation, investment in the ATIC reinforces Thales Australia's position as a significant player in its parent company's worldwide simulation operations.

Opened in March by Defence Minister Dr Brendan Nelson, the facility is currently demonstrating its capabilities to the ADF and DSTO. However, it is expected shortly to be used for modelling work involved in the bid by ADI (50 per cent owned by Thales) in association with the French company Armaris (itself 50 per cent owned by Thales) to supply the French Mistral design as the Royal Australian Navy's next generation of amphibious landing ships.

The ATIC will also play a vital role in the ADI-DSTO strategic alliance to investigate techniques for modelling the capability enhancements delivered by network centric warfare.

Barakat noted the increased use of simulation by Army, and disclosed that TT&S was considering development of a driving simulator for ADI's Bushmaster Infantry Mobility Vehicle - 299 of which are currently being delivered to Army - based on the Trust 5000 driving simulator developed by Thales and in service in several European countries. This same system could be adapted for the Land 121 field vehicle replacement program. ADI is pursuing Project Land 121 in collaboration with Oshkosh Truck Corporation of the US and Automotive Technik.

The first three of nine crew procedure trainers for the ASLAV turret - developed and built by TT&S for the Australian Army under a A$15 million contract signed in 2001 - are currently undergoing final acceptance testing before delivery to the School of Armour at Puckapunyal. The other six will be delivered before the end of the year to Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane and Robertson Barracks in Darwin.

The simulator turret includes feed shutes and ammunition boxes for the ASLAV's M242 Bushmaster 25mm chain gun and the coaxial MAG 58 7.62mm machine gun. Thirteen channels of the ThalesView PC image generator combine to provide 180 degree panoramic out-of-the-hatch views and 360 degree vision within the turret via simulated periscopes as well as night vision goggles and image intensified sighting systems.

TT&S is optimistic about export orders, with initial focus on New Zealand which is seeking gunnery simulators for its LAV-3s. Subsequent marketing through Thales will be directed at several Middle Eastern opportunities including Saudi Arabia's National Guard, which is forming five LAV-equipped brigades. There are numerous other markets where the locally developed Thales product is well suited such as in Portugal, whose armed forces are buying several hundred LAV-like Pandur II light armoured vehicles.

TT&S's largest single simulation project remains its support for Project Air 87 and the Tiger helicopter. Under a $150 million contract, the company is providing a full flight mission simulator (FF&MS) with dual cockpits mounted on separate, synchronised motion platforms. The cockpits, occupied by the pilot and the battle captain, provide the complete flight and battlefield mission experience required to train the two-man Tiger crews.

Mission simulation includes high fidelity sensor devices and weapons, including the Hellfire missile. The wide field of view visual system displays the more than two million square kilometres of Australian terrain mapped from Oakey to Townsville and around the Bradshaw training area near Darwin.

The simulator, produced by a combined Australian/French team at a Thales facility near Paris, commenced installation at the Army aviation training base at Oakey near Towoomba in January and will undergo testing in June.

Under the same contract, the company is also producing two crew procedural trainers (CPT) for the Tiger, one of which is currently being assembled in France and the other at the Qantas simulation centre in Sydney. Each CPT consists of the same high fidelity cockpit and mission system simulations as the FF&MS but with a reduced field of view visual system and no motion platform. In essence, therefore, Thales is delivering six high fidelity simulators under this contract.

The Wedgetail full flight Level D simulator developed by Thales under contract to Boeing Australia is undergoing final acceptance and accreditation, and is scheduled to become operational at Williamtown in late May. This zero flight time device will enable aircrew trained on the simulator to be qualified on the Wedgetail, including for air-to-air refuelling, without having to rack up expensive flight hours on the actual aircraft. The Wedgetail simulator utilises the ThalesView software-based Image Generator solution that delivers the most advanced level of visual simulator currently available. The software achieves full Level D compliance on high end commercially-available PCs incorporating graphics processors from suppliers such as nVidia and ATi.

TT&S has been less successful in signing off its advanced flight simulator for the RAAF's AP-3C Orions. Although the simulator has been in use an average of 16 hours per day since 2003, it has yet to gain full accreditation. Thales says much of the difficulty in achieving accreditation is derived from problems encountered in the original RAAF AP-3C flight test program that led to corrupted data. Thales, the DMO and the RAAF are continuing a program of subjective tuning of the flight model to overcome the problems.


Thales maintains that it is a global leader for what it calls "dual use technologies" - technologies developed for military purposes which have powerful applications in civilian and commercial life.

Historically this is nothing new - penicillin and the Internet spring immediately to mind as examples of military technologies which transformed civilian and commercial life.

At TT&S, simulation has migrated from the battlefield to three non-military environments - commercial airlines, major event security, and transport and utilities infrastructure.

The Wedgetail simulator shares technology common with state of the art Thales Full Flight Simulators that are currently training Australian civil airline pilots for Qantas, Jetstar, and Virgin Blue. Thales is currently performing a major upgrade to two Boeing 747-400 simulators it delivered to Qantas more than 15 years ago. In addition it is upgrading the visual systems on four other Qantas simulators, including the B737-800, B767-300 and A330 simulators, delivered recently.

ADI Limited - for which Thales has recently applied to the Foreign Investment Review Board to lift its shareholding from 50 per cent to 100 per cent - has a limited track record in logistics systems management. TT&S says it hopes to develop the ATIC as a powerful tool for planning upgrades to major rail, road and utilities infrastructure.

With Sydney's rail system embarking on a five-year program to untangle its network, and many of Australia's energy networks rapidly ageing, simulation capabilities may become as important to State governments as they to Australia's military.

With the next APEC meeting due to be held in Sydney in September 2007, domestic national security issues are high on the agenda of Australia's intelligence organisations, police forces and special forces.

Fresh from successfully providing the Special Operations Command Support System (SOCSS) for the SAS at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Thales and ADI say they are hoping to provide more comprehensive security and surveillance solutions for APEC, including facial recognition, smart card, and a suite of related technologies.

According to TT&S's Sales and Marketing Manager, Tony Landers, the ATIC's simulation capability could play a crucial part in planning for APEC.

"The ATIC, as a facility, provides not only a focus for the experimentation and evaluation of technologies and operational concepts but just as importantly a venue for the sharing and communicating of insights derived from such activities.

"We already have vast experience at modelling urban environments and the complex interactions of people and systems within those environments. The ATIC would be an ideal forum for the mission rehearsal of such events as APEC", Landers said.

By Julian Kerr, Sydney