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Swedish Flight Simulator Adds G Forces
jonerik writes "According to this article in Aviation Week and Space Technology, Sweden's Dynamic Flight Simulator (DFS) is believed to be the first flight simulator which actually allows fighter pilots to experience G forces under simulated conditions. Designed and built by California-based Wyle Laboratories, the DFS is essentially a flight simulator capsule (in this case for Sweden's JAS 39 Gripen fighter) located at the end of a 30-foot centrifuge arm. 'We wanted to give pilots the ability to "fly" and interact with the environment rather than just be a passive [centrifuge] rider,' said Will Roberts, program manager for Wyle Laboratories' DFS programs. 'We've come a long way in being able to translate the six degrees-of-freedom you get in an aircraft into the three degrees-of-freedom that we can control in a centrifuge. It's not perfect, but we think it's pretty good. There's room for more research to make it even better.'"
They should give this thing a try. Looks fun. They brought it to Detroit once and I was going to ride on it until someone puked all over.
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How long before we get an arcade version?
What is it exactly that the Swedish use these fighters for? Don't get me wrong... I think every country should be entitled to a proper defence force, but are these planes simply sitting on the ground, or are they getting some use? It's some pretty impressive technology the Sweeds have, so one would hope they're actually putting it to use. I'm just thinking that I can't recall hearing in recent memory of a Swedish border conflict, or a Swedish peace-keeping force. Is there anyone out there more familiar with Swedish military history that could enlighten us /.'ers?
I used to work for Wyle in San Antonio where they had a forerunner to the DFS called the ASDD (Advanced Spatial Disorientation Demonstrator). It was basically a cockpit the could rotate like a gryoscope and was mounted on a large, rotating motion base arm.
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You can see the cockpit here:
http://safety.kirtland.af.mil/magazine/htdocs/m
Look behind the visible screens (which make up the simulated flight control tower). The fun part is inside the round cockpit behind the glass. That part spins around to produce up to about 3 G's. You can't see in this picture but the cockpit rotates around like a 30 foot circle once it gets going, plus it spins around it's own center.
See also:
http://safety.kirtland.af.mil/magazine/htdocs/m
Older technology, but still cool. In that lab we used to study how different kinds of motion would fool the inner ear. Such as, a pilot who is taking off and who looks over his shoulder at the ground will experience a balance illusion that will throw off his perception of "down". If he is not trained to compensate, and is distracted by other circumstances, this illusion can easy cause him to bank the plane into a crash.
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Part of their (smart) thinking: if the major airstrips get bombed, they have literally thousands of places where they widened stretches of 'normal' roads, so they can land, take off there, there are also numerous hidden hangars and maintenance stuff. Idea is that an enemy would never come around to bomb *all* these stretches, most are 'fake'
Many years ago a traveling VR "arcade" visited my city. (This was easily 10 years ago, but I can't recall the exact date.) One of the rides that stood out in my mind was a fighter plane sim with G-forces. The player sat in a spherical pod at the end of a centrifuge arm. The game screen remained black while the carousel built up to speed. The default orientation of the pod kept the G-forces "eyes down" through the seat of the pants. In other words, the player would feel a bit heavier than normal as the game built up to speed.
Once at speed, the game started. Moving the joystick re-oriented the pod. For example, a "climb" rolled the pod downward so that the player felt the G-forces "eyes out" against his back. Similar shifts applied to other maneuvers, thus giving realtime feedback. It was not exactly like being in a plane (I've been in aerobatic planes), but the suggestion of maneuver accelerations was deceptively good. (Sorry, no inverted flight. The harness wasn't up to it.)
I'm sure the military grade simulator in the article is much fancier than the VR ride. (I could not hit the site -- it has been Slashdotted.) But to put it bluntly, "been there, done that."
I'd like to preface this post by saying that I know very little about the mechanics of simulators such as these. I do however know quite a lot about sensory and perception in regards to flight studies. The problem with attempting to simulate motion, let alone G-forces, is that humans are very good at detecting aberrations from realistic movement. The "detection" usually results in headaches or blowing bannana chunks all over the cockpit, but it's a detection nonetheless. [1] In short, if the simulator display indicates a slight oscilation or elevation due to a thermal, and the force feedback doesn't mimic it just right, and then that happens repeatedly inbetween bouts of actually successfully fooling your sensory and perception system, we get the aforementioned chunks being blown. Millions of dollars of research have been thrown at this problem, only to find one very clear thing. By the time you can get the system finely tuned enough that you can always fool the human, it's cost prohibitive. The benefit and coolness factor of feeling the actual motion isn't significant enough of a boost to the learning process to justify the cost. [1] Bannanas are the #1 meal suggestion before FAM (familiarization) flights in new figthers, since they taste roughly the same coming up as they do going down.