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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.'"
...the use of a smaller drive motor. Wyle chose a 1,900-kw. Westinghouse DC motor originally designed for steel mill applications, connected directly to the centrifuge-arm drive system. It delivers about 7 megawatts of peak power in approximately 100 millisec
If that's smaller, what was the bigger one??
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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That's a real step forward in a technological sort of a way, but why? Have we had a problem with poor standards in fighter pilot training in recent years? I have to admit that if either the US or anywhere else, including my beloved UK has had this problem I had not heard.
Seems like a lot of effort for not too much reward to me but what do I know?
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How long before we get an arcade version?
Ok, I'm waiting the home version of this capsule, I want to test Flight Simulator with it.
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Any chance they'll make a sex simulator with a simulated G-spot?
I thought that Gripen was the name for one of those fancy IKEA entertainment centers.
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?
Great news, but I hope they have a realistic simulation for ejecting and crashing too. If I remember correctly, the plane was crashed twice by the same pilot while testing it in the '90s. Some things would just be cheaper to simulate. :)
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.
a rm ag97/mar15.htm
a rm ag97/mar1005.htm
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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From the link about the plane.. scroll down
is it just me or is that not a house in the background
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Has anyone else tried the new Mission to Space ride at Disney World? It's also an articulated cetrifuge ride.
It was the most incredible ride I've ever been on. It will definately make your inner ears confused and it seems to mess with your brain in other ways. It made me feel sick for the rest of the day.
People seem revere pilots and astronauts for their bravery and reflexes. I'm most impressed by their ability to tolerate motion sickness.
.. how do they turn right? AS long as they fly LEFT turns theyre ok :D other wise that would blow the realism.
It's cheaper and safer to train a pilot to handle G-induced stresses than in a real plane. Plus, you're saving the aircraft from stress, which extends the lifetime. Finally, it's cheaper to clean up afterwards if there's a problem--much less cash involved in replacing the centrifuge's motor than in replacing a jet, even if it's only a trainer.
Of course, this is only a suppliment. The pilot will still require in-air training. Just not as much to keep in top shape.
Well, the impressive tech, plus drilling with the equipment, keeps the Swedish military in pretty good condition. Which is why it doesn't see much real use. Looks fierce enough that it doesn't actually have to fight.
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Enough about flight. What about the Swedish Chef Simulator?
Is it just me or does this JAS 39 Gripen fighter look a lot like an F-16? It appears to play the same role as the F-16 (a light fighter/ground attack aircraft). I know that many countries (especially NATO members) use F-16s. Does anyone know if that's what this plane actually is?
Hm, I always thought that "G-force" was just a way of measuring the force created by the acceleration (something about f = ma) by comparing it to gravity. So a force equal to twice that of gravity would give you 2 G's - what exactly is the problem?
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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.
It was a simple buffer overflow bug in the steering system. The system buffered all the pilots movements and performed them one at a time, but the buffer was too small and could actually overflow and crash the system.
Amazingly, this flaw was known by the american company that manufactured the component and the pilots where instructed not to use the "joystick" too much.
The steering system has since been replaced.
IIRC, even though this is not classified in any way, the true cause for the crashes was never properly reported. I know because I am related to one of the guys who did the error investigation. Perhaps the swedish airforce thought that a simple buffer overflow error was too embarassing to admit...
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I mean, they can do it on Star Trek, right? Artificial gravity would be the perfect tech for this purpose... putting a simulator capsule on a centrifuge is so, like, stone age. ;)
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Acceleration is not a force...
You are right, acceleration is not a force. It is what happens to an object when it is acted upon by some force. However for simplicity's sake, the term "One Gee" is used to describe the force of Gravity on earth. The apparent "Force" encountered when acceleration meets inertia is also described using these same units of measurement.
To the average person, there need not be any difference. To physicists, maybe; but not for "Joe Six-pack".
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Depending on what the orientation is of the pilot with respect to the gravitational force AND what the visual system in the cockpit is showing him he can basically feel any linear acceleration in any direction. The problem is that the cockpit has to be gimbaled and the rotation must be slow enough so that the pilot does not notich it as a "false cue" (= something he should not feel). Another problem is that you can only vary the centryfugal force so fast, hence the large motors to accelerate and slwo down the centrifuge.
An interesting solution is in one of the other posts (see this post of DESDEMONA).
Infinite was a bad choice of words, but the energy required is still much much greater. There are two kinds of friction, sliding friction and static friction. The coefficient of sliding friction is lower than that of static friction. Static friction contributes more to overall friction because the surfaces in contact are partly bonded together by molecular forces. However, since this bonding isn't instantaneous, surfaces that are moving don't end up bonding together as strongly. So to get something moving you have to overcome static friction and then just keep pouring in a much smaller amount of energy to continue to overcome the sliding friction.
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