The Navy in January of 2000 started to issue a customized version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator to all student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at 65 colleges. The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has also installed Flight Simulator on high-powered Pentium III PC workstations with 29-inch screens at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.
The decision to include the game in the training curriculum stems from the results of a research project conducted by the Navy last summer. Scott Dunlap, head of the Assessment Project Office for the Chief of Naval Education and Training in Pensacola, Fla., said the study found that students who use microsimulation products during early flight training tend to have higher scores than students who do not use the software.
Dunlap credits LTJG Herb Lacey, now a naval aviator, with jump-starting the Navy’s use of Flight Simulator in its training environment. While a student pilot, Lacey used the customization functions of the commercial software to create the control panel of the standard Navy trainer, the T34C, and to model the landscapes around Navy training fields in Florida and Texas. "We basically took Lacey’s aircraft panels and scenery, dropped that into our microsimulation project and developed a learning methodology around them," Dunlap said.
Flight Simulator allows students to learn and practice basic procedures, such as cockpit control manipulation and navigation, before they get into an airplane.
Bill Lewandowski, manager of the training systems division of Flight Safety International — the world’s largest trainer of professional pilots — said his company uses Flight Simulator extensively to enhance the ground school experience. But, Lewandowski emphasized, microsimulation products cannot replace full-motion, multimillion dollar flight simulators used by airlines and the military. "You cannot replicate that in a PC environment," Lewandowski said.
The Navy’s Dunlap agreed. "We see this fitting in between what you learn in the classroom and the higher forms of simulation," he said. Even with this caveat, Dunlap said the Navy wants to incorporate microsim training into the next-generation Joint Primary Aircraft Training System, a multibillion-dollar training program based on a Raytheon Co. advanced single-engine trainer.