aviation

“We flew 4 F-15s and 4 F-22s against 14 ‘red air’ fighters: Blue Air killed 41 enemy aircraft and lost just one. While pretty phenomenal, perfection is our goal so the debrief focused on how we could have had a 41-0 ratio,” Col. William Bladen, 104th FW

In order to participate in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Program (WSEP), over 250 Airmen and 9 F-15 Eagles from the 104th Fighter Wing (FW), Massachusetts Air National Guard (ANG), as well as Canadian F-18, F-35, F-16, and F-22 aircraft, recently deployed to Tyndall Air Force Base (AFB), Florida.

As stated in the article 104th Fighter Wing Eagles on Target at the United States Air Force’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Program, the aircraft is loaded and fires live missiles as part of WSEP, according to Master Sgt. Julie Avey of the 104th Fighter Wing. The WSEP assesses the technical data, maintenance, aircrew, weaponry, weapons delivery systems, and weapons. The aim is to assess operational effectiveness, confirm the performance of weapons systems, establish dependability, and assess capabilities.

“The WSEP does two things,” said Col. Jeffrey Rivers, Commander of the 83rd Fighter Weapons Squadron, Weapons Systems Evaluation Program. “It feeds Combat Air Force’s (CAF) training and readiness. We get aircrew experience for the first time subsequent to the events, sounds, sights, smells, and noise of a real missile coming off the jet in a realistic scenario they would find normally in training but now it is with real weapons and real targets to shoot at.”

Only nine of the 221 missions were not flown by the unit because of weather. Additionally, the 104th FW flew 293.1 hours during WSEP with an 83% mission-competent rate and successfully deployed 17 missiles.

Additionally, the 104th FW fired 14,661 bullets, totaling a flawless shooting rate of all aircraft weapons.

“Our deployment to Tyndall really had two different but complementary themes,” said Col. William Bladen, 104th FW, Operations Group Commander. “The WSEP portion focused on exercising and testing the kill chain from the missile build all the way through its destruction of a target. It takes several miracles for a missile to complete an intercept. If anyone of them fails, the kill chain is broken. WSEP tested our people and our machines and both performed exceptionally well.”

According to Bladen, the second component of the deployment included large force exercises (LFEs) and 4-ship training with an emphasis on air-to-air confrontations.

“With several other fighter airframes on the Gulf Coast, we were able to put together daily outnumbered scenarios that we cannot produce up here at Barnes. On the last day of the trip, we flew 4 F-15s and 4 F-22s against 14 “red air” fighters. For our training, we allowed the red air to regenerate after being killed by a blue air fighter. The final results of that mission: Blue Air killed 41 enemy aircraft and lost just one. While pretty phenomenal, perfection is our goal so the debrief focused on how we could have had a 41-0 ratio.”

Although the results of the mock battles are pretty remarkable, they are not a surprise. As we’ve already written, the F-15 is a real “air superiority master” with an unsurpassed air-to-air kill ratio of 104 to 0. When the Eagle is combined with the fifth-generation capabilities of the F-22 stealth fighter, the odds of an adversary aircraft winning an air-to-air battle are extremely slim.

Photo by Tech. Sgt. Ben Bloker, Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald / U.S. Air Force

When outfitted as a C-17, for example, VISTA’s highly modified F-16 will react like a C-17, not an F-16, simulating the flight characteristics of many different aircraft

Students at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) Test Pilot School (TPS) finished testing an innovative aircraft control system that is intended to add a margin of safety to aviation in 2016, as stated by Christopher Ball, 412th Test Wing Public Affairs in his article VISTA gives TPS a clearer view of the new flight control system.

When installed as a backup system in any fly-by-wire aircraft, the L1 Adaptive Control System is a software system that can quickly learn the flying characteristics of the aircraft and then help the aircraft in the event of a control surface or system failure.

It was created and tested here by a team of TPS students from class 16A. It was conceived and built by a professor and two graduate students from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

The Aeronautica Militare Italiana (AMI, Italian Air Force) Capt. Raffaele Odesco, French Air Force Maj. Nicolas Langevin, and test pilots Capt. Daniel Edelstein, as well as flight test engineers Capts. Craig Porter and Clark McGehee made up the TPS team.

After finishing the one-year program, graduates of the Test Pilot School are awarded a master’s degree in scientific in-flight testing.

“In order to get a master’s, you need to do a project of some sort,” Cotting said. “Typically you do a master’s thesis. We have our students do a group project. The idea is we want them to take the lessons they’ve learned in how to plan and execute a flight test and actually go do that.”

The typical flight test procedure might have been costly and time-consuming because the controller is adaptive and made to work on any fly-by-wire aircraft. The NF-16 Variable-stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft, also known as VISTA, was chosen by the class to test the system.

The F-16 VISTA is an experimental aircraft that is based on the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which General Dynamics and Calspan jointly modified for use by the USAF.

The multi-axis thrust vectoring (MATV) engine nozzle on the F-16 VISTA testbed aircraft allows for more active management of the aircraft in a post-stall scenario. The end product is a super maneuverable aircraft that maintains pitch and yaw control at angles of attack when conventional control surfaces are unable to change attitude.

Although the VISTA program was deemed successful, fighter versions without thrust vector control (TVC) were never produced.

Additionally, the program was significant for the creation of Direct Voice Input and the “Virtual HUD,” both of which were subsequently included in the cockpit design for the F-35 Lightning II (with the F-35B variant additionally employing MATV while hovering to offer attitude control).

Calspan currently runs and maintains the VISTA aircraft for TPS. It is frequently employed in academic projects like the one discussed in this article as well as other unique student curriculum initiatives.

This heavily modified F-16, however, can mimic the flight characteristics of numerous different aircraft. If the aircraft is configured as a C-17, for instance, when the pilot uses the flying controls, the aircraft will react like a C-17, not an F-16, according to Ball.

“We can make the aircraft fly like anything we want within its performance envelope. We have safety trips on it so if the aircraft goes to an attitude we’re uncomfortable with it will trip off and a safety pilot will have the original aircraft fly safely,” Cotting said.

“This allows us to put research flight control laws on there without having to go through the normal flight test process so we can literally go from basic design, test in a simulator, and go fly all in the same day, as opposed to the months it would take to go through the normal process,” Cotting said. “From a researcher’s point of view, you can see where that could be very advantageous.”

The L1 controller, according to Cotting, is a relatively innovative concept in that it doesn’t have to be aware of the characteristics of the airplane you’re placing it on.

“You give it some basic information about the airplane and the adaptive controller should be able to configure itself to make the aircraft fly like anything I tell it I want to fly like,” he said.

“So in our case, we use something called a reference model which is a set of dynamics we would like the airplane to fly,” he said. “We tell it some information about the aircraft, but not a lot, and then it goes and sorts out how to make the aircraft fly like the reference set of dynamics.”

Installing the controller on VISTA and evaluating the team’s performance estimates’ accuracy were also steps in the procedure. “We also wanted to test some different configurations of VISTA that are normally unsafe to fly and see how well this controller can recover the aircraft back to a reference set of dynamics that we do think is safe to fly,” Cotting said.

Any fly-by-wire aircraft can use the adaptive control system. The C-17 Globemaster II, the F-16 Falcon, the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Lightning II are a few of the fly-by-wire aircraft at Edwards. Fly-by-wire aircraft are also being produced for commercial usage by a large number of aircraft manufacturers, including Boeing and Airbus.

Photo by Capt. Craig Porter / U.S. Air Force