re: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Thread
From MARINE CORPS AIR STATION BEAUFORT, SC:
Posted on InsideDefense.com: June 27, 2014
The Marine Corps is ready to begin F-35 pilot training here at the start of fiscal year 2015 as long planned, according to the officer in charge of the new training center, but current schedules would leave the center with a shortage of full-mission simulators for a number of months.
The Marines are at an inflection point in their Joint Strike Fighter training program as they get ready to leave the multiservice, multinational training center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and open their own facility at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, SC. Inside the Navy visited the base and the newly constructed F-35B Pilot Training Center (PTC) on June 24 and toured the facility with its lead officer, Lt. Col. Luis Villalobos.
Villalobos said the service is prepared to open its doors on Oct. 1 and will graduate between 14 and 16 pilots in FY-15 using a curriculum nearly identical to what has been taught at Eglin AFB. He and his staff were instructed by the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps to be "ready for operations" at the start of calendar year 2014, to give the PTC time to test out its plans and activities for the fall. An evaluation done this spring showed promising results, he added.
MCAS Beaufort is scheduled to receive its first two F-35 aircraft in early July.
"In the March and April time frame, we did a dry run of the training system," Villalobos said. "We did a three-week quick look to assess all those things, from how well our [contractor instructor pilots] are qualified and standardized to be able to instruct, if we have any IT anomalies or anything like that, and what we found out is that I think we are pretty confident . . . for our transition conversion pilots to start in October."
"Transition conversion pilots" refers to experienced Marine aviators who are moving from the F/A-18 Hornet or AV-8B Harrier to the short-takeoff-vertical-landing F-35B. Eventually, the Marine Corps and the other military services will allow pilots straight out of flight school to enter JSF training, but that will occur after the aircraft has been deemed to reach initial operational capability.
The Marines' desired F-35 IOC date, which is driving nearly all JSF-related activities at a breakneck pace, is the fall or winter of 2015. There are many factors that could impact the service's ability to hit that target: the pace of developmental and operational flight testing, modifications to existing aircraft, and pilot and maintainer production, among others.
Villalobos mentioned one slight disconnect between resources and schedules that could affect the training center's ability to instruct as many pilots as expected. The PTC currently has two full-mission F-35 simulators and is scheduled to receive its third and fourth simulators from Lockheed Martin in the fall of 2015. However, he said it is important those two additional simulators arrive at Beaufort sooner, because the Marine Corps is starting to accept pilots into the JSF training pipeline who are qualified but not as experienced as those already in the program.
"We need more simulators, and Headquarters Marine Corps has been very supportive in trying to push that through the [F-35 joint program office]," he said. "Just like the aircraft production line, the simulator production line has gone through a lot of iterative learning, and part of that has been the time line associated with how long it takes to build a simulator and so forth. What we've seen is Lockheed is trying to pull that time line back to the left a little bit more, but honestly I think we need to look at having those simulators on hand as part of the criteria to be able" to train so-called Category 1 pilots, those with meaningful but limited fighter experience.
Villalobos continued: "We need to have those simulators here by no later than mid-summer of 2015, the third and fourth sims, which are currently projected to be here early fall."
The PTC is being asked to grow its pilot graduation figures quickly -- from around 15 next year, to 26 in FY-16, and up to around 60 in the following two years.
The F-35 simulators at MCAS Beaufort will at first be configured with Block 2A software and hardware, which enables very limited usage of the aircraft's advanced sensors. Most of the Marine Corps' training jets are actually equipped with an inferior software load, Block 1B, and the simulators are backwards-compatible with that block.
Marine IOC requires delivery of the next version of F-35 software and hardware, called Block 2B, which will for the first time allow the aircraft to launch some live weapons and introduce additional avionics capabilities. The simulators and courseware used at Beaufort will need to be updated to reflect Block 2B once it becomes available to the fleet sometime next year.
The Joint Strike Fighter's pilot-training simulators are generally considered to be of extremely high quality, and Villalobos said he hopes some maintenance training will eventually be able to be done on the machines as well. For the foreseeable future, Marine maintainers will continue to be trained at Eglin AFB alongside technicians from other services and countries.
