Targeting & Delivering Effect for Future Force 2020

The Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty, outlines the needs of the UK’s future force structure. This structure, Future Force 2020, will be a highly capable force ready to react, at various levels of intensity, to the complex threat scenarios that may develop in future.  It will be a flexible and expeditionary force based on fewer platforms that must be able to deliver effectors with a high degree of accuracy and in a timely manner by air, land or sea.

The threats Future Force 2020 is likely to meet will be challenging. For instance, the threat can use camouflage, concealment and deception measures, presenting targets that could be fleeting in nature. In addition, those threats may evolve more rapidly than our existing development cycles.  Moreover, it is anticipated that allied operations will be constrained by rules of engagement where collateral damage is unacceptable politically or legally.

For this transition to become a reality, the challenges of affordability must be met to provide these capability needs. Can we develop or adapt systems, technologies and operations to achieve this?

In order to address these issues, a classified conference is being organised by the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Weapon Systems and Technology Specialist Group.  This conference will focus on future operational needs, force structure or system concepts, targeting and weapon effects aligned to Future Force 2020.

The Future Rotorcraft: Enabling capability through the application of technology

The performance and utility of the ubiquitous edge wise rotary wing configured aircraft has reached a natural limit. The enormous strides taken by the fixed wing community in the development of increasingly efficient, mission focussed, cost effective, green and quick to market solutions have not been matched by the rotary wing community.  The barrier to matching the fixed wing community is not concepts or vision: it is the infrastructure of technology and manufacturing techniques that have contrived to hold our community back.  Learning lessons from the fixed wing community and adapting them to suit the needs of the rotary wing vehicle is our challenge and the time is now right to take on this challenge and succeed.

The rotary wing vehicle has always provided a niche capability, serving its operators well in situations where no other vehicle could achieve the desired result.  It has provided  search and rescue as well as emergency medical services that have saved countless lives, it has delivered military effect with great impact, it has supported the development and realisation of off shore energy delivery and it has connected city centres for convenient transportation.

Yet, despite these achievements the effectiveness of the rotary wing configuration has stagnated as one or two tried and tested configurations using the edge-wise rotor have dominated this mode of transport.
The V22 Osprey and BA609 have shown that other configurations are viable and offer significant performance benefits, but so far the tilt rotor has not shown that it can achieve a paradigm shift in respect of time to market and cost of ownership.  Recently, others have returned to concepts that may have been tried before but until now were only viable as one off prototypes or design studies that never left the drawing boards.

Enabling technologies related to materials, construction and design tools have matured in the fixed wing community and are beginning to find application to rotary wing solutions.  The inevitable and appropriate pressures of environment safety must also be recognised, accepted and converted from complex problem to cost effective solution.

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From Pioneers to Presidents: Celebrating a Century of Women in Flight

Following the success of last year’s RAeS Women in Aerospace & Aviation Conference, the 2011 Networking Event will celebrate a century of women’s acheivements in flight.

The Wonderful Women Ferry Pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary

The Royal Aeronautical Society is offering a unique opportunity to meet the few surviving women pilots who ferried every type of military aircraft during World War II, including fighters, huge four-engine bombers as the sole pilot and even the first British jet-engine aeroplane. By the end of the war, ATA pilots had each flown dozens of different aircraft, sometimes several in one day, often never having seen the aeroplane before, far less flown it.

During the seminar, you will hear why the ATA was such a unique organisation, how the women ferry pilots were trained and what they achieved, what an RAF bomber pilot thought of the young women who delivered aircraft to his base, and finally hear from the so-called ‘Spitfire Women’ themselves about their memories of these extraordinary times and their experiences.

At the end of this special seminar, the Royal Aeronautical Society will be making a presentation to the ATA women pilots present to honour their extraordinary achievements.

This Lecture will focus on the training of cockpit crew for Concorde. Together, Capt John Eames and SEO Roger Bricknell will discuss Flight Crew Training, highlighting the differences between Concorde and subsonic airliners that Pilots had to be trained to cope with. In addition, the lecture will touch on the novelty and complexity of Concorde at the time of its introduction, including fly-by-wire control of the centre of gravity by fuel transfer, behaviour at high incidence, adjustable air intakes and exhausts, the reduced range in subsonic flight and the emergency procedures for pressurisation problems at 60,000ft.

For more than half a century now, the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) has provided for the world’s aerospace engineers, scientists, technologists and managers, the preeminent forum to present and discuss the latest developments in aeronautics. This remarkable apolitical organization founded by Theodore von Karman and his international colleagues, continues to build on its impressive heritage, to be even more relevant to the global aerospace and aviation industries. This world congress staged biennially by ICAS is the key opportunity for those committed to serving those industries to meet, present, discuss and create opportunities that can only be done in such an international environment.

Autumn 2011 Flight Simulation Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS - The Contribution of Flight Simulation to Aviation Safety

Flight Simulation’s broad role in developing, maintaining and enhancing flight safety is well recognised, but have advances in simulation technology and capability been matched by corresponding improvements in the way we conduct training?

Today’s environment is one of increased cockpit automation, airspace congestion, ultra long haul operations, enhanced flight envelope protection and arguably reduced levels of actual manual flying experience in the new generation of flight crews. The levelling off of hitherto falling accident rates, and the changing balance of the causal factors behind them, illustrated by a number of recent highly publicised accidents and incidents, suggest that there are areas for improvement, and that we must continue to strive to further improve our safety record.

The Royal Aeronautical Society Flight Simulation Group has recognised this, and for the past 5 years has overseen several international, multi-disciplinary study groups. The latest one of these is the International Committee for Aviation Training in Extended Envelopes (ICATEE). Its objective is to look at all aspects of live and synthetic training for anticipating, recognising, avoiding, and recovering from unusual attitudes and flight situations, aircraft upset, and loss of control in flight. ICATEE will bring together the best practice in current education, flight instruction and training, updated by the latest research and a rigorous methodology.

Additionally, the IATA International Training and Qualification Initiative (ITQI) promises improvements in flight crew knowledge, skills and attitudes and hence safety through evidence-based competency training regimes. These have far reaching implications on the way flight crew training is conducted, from ab-initio through to type rating and recurrent training, including instructional methods and standards.

While both ICATEE and ITQI are framed around civil large aircraft training and safety requirements, they have the potential to influence military training regimes, which increasingly rely on simulation to maintain standards and mission readiness. At the other end of the spectrum, low cost FSTDs, and new digital interactive media integrated into educational and training simulations, are increasingly being used to address the comparatively poor safety record of General Aviation (GA), both fixed- and rotary-wing. In other aspects of simulator-based training, advances in technology and functionality offer other benefits which can be harnessed to address more specific safety issues.

The conference will principally examine how all these initiatives link together through the use of flight simulation. A significant part of the Conference will be dedicated to the detailed reporting of both the Technical and Training sub-groups of the ICATEE. The sessions will address the approach taken to analyse the training requirements and to develop the rationale for a suitable range of live and simulator-based education, training, and instructional courseware. The Technical subgroup will present its recommendations for data collection and validation in support of enhanced simulator modelling and cueing systems. Papers are also being invited from the IATA ITQI team.

This Royal Aeronautical Society Flight Simulation Conference also invites papers on other safety related issues, in addition to IATA ITQI and ICATEE, such as:

• Simulator technological improvements to meet the safety-driven training and instructional challenges
• Low cost simulation and its potential contribution to safety
• What does GA – fixed wing and helicopters - need from simulation?
• How can flight simulation make a significant reduction in rotary wing accident rates?
• Instructor Qualification and Accreditation
• Human Factors and the Psychological Aspects of Simulator-based training.
• The Live/Synthetic Balance
• Leveraging the next generation in the gaming industry to enhance mission rehearsal training
• New Electronic and Distributed Media, such as games, Social Networks, and the iPad, and their implications for Training and Safety

Full details on how to submit an abstract for the Autumn 2011 Flight Simulation Conference can be found here.

The dealine for received abstracts is Thursday 21st Apri 2011.

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An International Approach to Flight Crew Training Standards

The Annual RAeS International Flight Crew Training Conference is well established and highly successful.  The 2011 Conference aims to seek solutions on how best to consider flight crew training standards from an international perspective.

The French Air & Space Academy will be visiting the UK and will host an informative evening of aerospace lectures. The evening will commence with a presentation of the Air & Space Academy hosted by Gerard Brachet and will be followed by three short presentations by aerospace experts.

Taking place on the 13th & 14th April 2011 at the Society’s Headquarters, Aerospace 2011: Funding the Future will focus on Aerospace & Aviation in an Age of Austerity and address how both the civil and defence communities can look to overcome economic uncertainties and grow business in the coming years.

AEROSPACE FOR EUROPE – MORE THAN JUST FLYING

High Value, Low Carbon, Europes Future

The most important multistakeholder high level roundtable congress in Brussels in December 2010.
This is the aerospace event of the year where decision maker of the most leading European industry, politics and research meet.

Change!  Innovation!  Vision 2050!

Spring 2011 Flight Simulation Conference

The World Outside The Aircraft - Simulating The Operational Environment

Much progress has been made and discussed in previous RAeS Flight Simulation Group Conferences on the simulation of an aircraft and its operational systems for use in flight crew training. International standards have even been drafted in the civil arena defining required levels of simulation fidelity as a function of training tasks.