FEBRUARY 6, 2017, EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AFNS) – One of 2016’s quick-kill innovation projects, the Portable Manned Interactive Cockpit, was deployed to Orlando, Florida, to participate in the Operation Blended Warrior event in December. This was the second year of a four-year event. Mark Louton, an Experimentation Center for Ideas/Technology Exploration team software developer and flier, Steve Hansen, an EXCITE team technician, Orion Westfall, the EXCITE team lead developer, and Marilyn Lang, the EXCITE team program manager, participated in the event.
OBW is a multi-year journey to explore the potential for Live, Virtual and Constructive capabilities to revolutionize training, education, and testing for the defense and security sectors. The overarching objectives of OBW include documenting lessons learned and facilitating identification of hindrances to achieve a true interoperable, plug-and-play environment associated with distributed training.
A mix of 52 entities within industry, government and military, interactively operated in a common visual environment. PMIC operated as an F-16 Fighting Falcon with air-to-air weapons capability. PMIC flew 30-minute operations each day over four days.
The PMIC team invested nine months of preparation to integrate 3-D visual models, which included missiles, aircraft ground threats, ships, visual databases and common digital terrain elevation data for fly-shoot-kill operations. A tactical radio application used as a primary battlespace communication method proved to be an interesting challenge for the integration team.
According to Jerry Lockwood, the EXCITE modeling and simulation flight chief, the integration of PMIC was very successful. “Using the PMIC, the team met objectives to find and secure an A-10 (Thunderbolt II) and achieve a radar lock on an enemy MiG-27. The lessons learned will be expanded into ground operations and integration of common digital terrain elevation data.”
By Experimentation Center for Ideas/Technology Exploration team