F-22 Raptor simulator comes to roost at JBER

  • Published
  • By David Bedard
  • JBER PAO
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  Located in 3rd Wing's Distributed Mission Operations Campus, the room which will eventually house the F-22 Raptor Full Mission Trainer simulator looks more like an F-117 Nighthawk stealth strike fighter turned inside out than the berth for a state-of-the-art simulator.

The walls, vents and even the large ceiling fans perched on the ceilings are covered in flat black paint. Gary Bruton, DMO project officer, said the paint scheme allows projection of a F-22 simulation in 360 degrees from top to bottom.

"It's like nothing else," he said with a grin. "It looks like a big Playstation game."
Recently, 3rd Operations Support Squadron leadership inspected the facility after it was turned over to their organization by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who constructed the facility and prepared it for installation of the F-22 FMT.

During the 3rd OSS inspection, contract workers scurried about the facility laying much of the groundwork for the simulator which Bruton said will be fully mission capable by January 2012.

Air Force lieutenant colonels Paul Greenlee, 3rd OSS director of operations, and Brian Baldwin, 3rd OSS fighter assistant director of operations, walked the corridors of the campus, gaining a full understanding of the infrastructure which will support the FMT.

The officers ducked under the silvery arteries of the FMT's air handler, which Bruton said closely regulates the temperature and humidity inside the simulator due to needs of the system's precise electronics.

Baldwin said the F-22 FMT has been two years in the making and is part of the larger project of consolidating 3rd Wing DMO in one building.

"We are the premier DMO hub in (Pacific Air Forces)," he said. "In the Pacific, you don't have another place where you've got the capabilities that we have, where our C-17s (Globemaster III), F-22s, (E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning And Controls System) and - potentially down the road - C-130s (Hercules), can all plug in to the Distributed Mission Operations network and train with people in Japan, people in Hawaii, train with people in the Lower 48."

Bruton elaborated on the DMO network's capabilities, saying units from across the world and representing all four military services can participate in an exercise fully organized, staged and undertaken in a virtual world.

Bruton said the F-22 FMT will consist of a gantry-mounted cockpit suspended more than 20 feet above the floor. Projectors will paint the visuals of the simulation for both day and night conditions, even allowing the pilot to use night-vision goggles to navigate the fighter.

Though 525th and 90th fighter squadrons participate in force-on-force exercises in Alaska and around the world, Baldwin said the FMT will supplement these maneuvers with full-spectrum simulations.

"There's a lot of great training we can do in the sim that is really difficult to do in real life," he said. "Red Flags only happen so often. Northern Edge, these kinds of exercises are awesome and you can't replace those, but because they're not here all the time, this gives us the ability to train to the highest levels."

Though the FMT allows F-22 pilots to hone their advanced skills, Baldwin said the simulator can help with fundamentals as well.

"It also gives us the ability to train to the most basic levels for pilot proficiency without having to spend airplane flying hours and maintenance costs to get some of that training in the actual airplane," he explained. "Some of it can be done in the simulator, things like instrument training.

"With a lot of your building block tactical training, you can get better training in the sim without burning the gas," Baldwin continued. "Then, when you get to flying the airplane, you can put it all together at a higher level."

The officer said with the loss of F-15 Eagle fighters at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, dissimilar air combat training opportunities have become more difficult to come by and F-22-on-F-22 exercises are unrealistic because no other country yet operates a fifth- generation stealth fighter.

With the FMT, Raptor pilots will be able to fly against the best Russian-made air superiority fighters as well as learn how to evade enemy air defenses.

"Unless we have (Su-27) Flankers and SA-10s (Grumble missile) or fancier missile systems like that available for our training purposes on a daily basis, this is the next best thing," Baldwin said.

The pilot said the F-22 FMT will round out the DMO campus' portfolio and greatly enhance the readiness of JBER's fighter squadrons.

"It fills a pretty big void we had when the Eagle went away and we had F-22s here but no sims," Baldwin said. "This puts us back on a footing where we can do a full mission rehearsal with most of the things we have at JBER, and allows us to practice on a
regular basis with other units out there."