The sim bay

The sim is powered by a few standard 19" racks of commodity Windows servers from L3 Communications (Boeing is actually the contractor which provides the simulator to the Navy, and they in turn subcontract the computer portions to L3). Years ago, the Navy used SGI Onyx machines for the simulation’s graphics, but commodity PCs running Windows 7 with Nvidia consumer GPUs have long since eclipsed that kind of specialty hardware in the all important "bang for buck" metric.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson



Lee Hutchinson

The cockpit where the pilot sits is an F/A-18F twin-seat mockup, surrounded by eight pentagonal screens arranged in a dodecahedron around the cockpit to provide a panoramic visual field for the pilot; each of the screens gets its image from a dedicated projector employing a set of mirrors to converge and align the image to the 5-sided screen’s surface. Each projector in turn is powered by its own dedicated server in the 19" rack outside. The servers for our sim are somewhat older, with Pentium 4 CPUs and NVidia GeForce 9800-series PCIe video cards. A ninth server, called the Real Time Interface server, functions as a controller and coordinator, keeping the eight others in sync. More servers running proprietary L3 software virtualize the aircraft’s avionics and control software and provide the actual in-cockpit displays (which display totally accurate symbology—the way the cockpit displays look in the simulator is identical to how they look in the aircraft).

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

The aging components are a frequent headache. A high-fidelity simulator takes typically about five years to go from design to delivery; during those five years, the state of the consumer electronics industry can radically shift. A simulator designed around 2008-era hardware might not come into service until 2013, and that means finding replacement hardware for the older simulators can be a struggle. It’s a problem that can extend to the flight line as well: Smith explained that Hornet mission data used to be loaded by plugging a 256MB PCMCIA card directly into the aircraft at launch. This changed only when it became impossible to find 256MB PCMCIA cards anymore—and the change brought its own difficulties. "Of course we’d hard-coded memory locations and whatnot, because, why wouldn’t you, right?" he said with an ironic laugh.

Server Administrator Mike Mercer told us that while the sim’s older hardware and graphics might not stack up against a current-gen video game, the simulation itself is extremely high in fidelity. "Where we spend the bulk of our money is modeling the cockpit so the pilot and the WSO"—that’s the back-seater, the Weapons System Operator, pronounced "wizzo"—"get the tactile feel. You can turn off all the lights, and all the buttons and everything are all the same, stick forces are the same, throttle friction is the same, weapons models, threat models, all the same."

It’s not just the cockpit that’s implemented exactly—the flight model is as exact as they can make it. "When you pull the stick, and you’re at 80 percent throttle, and you have two tanks and some bombs, the aircraft behaves the same way—drag and everything, as it would on a mission," said Mercer. The simulator is even compatible with helmet-mounted cueing systems or actual night-vision goggles, which are sometimes used by aviators flying at night.

"It is very much like flying the aircraft," interjected Smith. "You shut the lights off and put yourself behind the ship, which we’ll show you, and it’s very much like the real thing. Except for the fear of death!" he laughed.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

First flight

According to Smith, the typical training syllabus will see a student doing five simulator missions before setting foot in an actual F/A-18 cockpit; the student will go through another 150 hours of sim time before becoming a qualified Naval aviator (and that's just sim time—there's also a ton of actual for-real flying time). I started out a little different from the average rookie—for one, I was here to have some fun, and two, I knew I wasn’t going to get kicked out if I augured the simulated fighter jet directly into a wheat field somewhere like a $61 million lawn dart.

Smith crouched to my left as I settled into the cockpit, surveying the instrument panel in front of me while we idled on one of NAS Oceana’s simulated runways. The first thing I noticed was that the heads-up display was non-functional—the HUD was actually being projected on the screen directly in front of me instead of reflected up from within the instrument panel. It was properly positioned, but it wasn’t coming from the cockpit equipment. The second thing was that although the dodecahedral screens were angled oddly to someone standing outside the sim, they were aligned perfectly for the cockpit’s occupants. The image displayed on each faceted screen was correctly warped and adjusted for the screen’s angle—turning your head and looking from side to side or up or behind you showed a cohesive, convincing two-dimensional image.

The rudder pedals beneath my feet felt as stiff as I expected, but the surprising thing was the control stick itself—it required what I’d characterize as a non-trivial amount of effort to move. It was certainly far stiffer than the Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS on my desk at home. The throttle levers, by contrast, moved easier than I expected—though they were also motorized, capable of moving themselves during autopilot, and I could feel a bit of resistance from the motors inside as I moved them back and forth.

The first thing we did was take off from NAS Oceana, a process which was accomplished pretty much exactly how I’ve done it in flight simulators—flaps down, throttle all the way forward and over the detents into afterburner (into "blower," is how Smith referred to it), get the airspeed up a bit, then rotate. We didn't worry about V1 or V2 or any of that real pilot nonsense—Smith just told me to pull the stick back at about 140 knots and to hold it until the HUD's velocity vector—the "this is where the plane is going" indicator projected in front of me—was at about ten degrees up. The plane lifted gracefully without fuss. Once airborne, we raised the flaps and the gear and dropped out of afterburner, then tooled around Norfolk.

The aircraft simulator, truthfully, was far easier to fly than I expected. It flew like any PC-based jet flight simulator. The Super Hornet was responsive but not twitchy, and it wasn’t difficult at all to select a place where I wanted to go, point the plane at it, and go. Early on I asked Smith where the turn and bank indicator was so I could try out a coordinated turn, only for him to tell me that in normal flight the aircraft coordinates turns by itself, automatically. I quit trying to dial rudder into my turns and let the plane do whatever it wanted. "Hornet guys are lazy," laughed Smith. "We never use the rudder unless we’re in a dogfight and you want the nose to do something nuts."

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Punching transonic holes through the sky above simulated Virginia Beach was effortless, and we tooled around at between 15,000 and 20,000 feet as I enjoyed the aircraft, making it do things that, based on my time in the Gnat trainer, would have made me lose my lunch in real life. I practiced keeping my altitude up in steep banks (easy, because all you have to do is align the HUD’s velocity vector element with the horizon, and the aircraft takes care of the rest). I pulled 7Gs in a Millennium Falcon-style Immelmann turn, arcing up and rolling out, trading high transonic speeds for altitude. I pulled 6- and 7G turns, putting the aircraft on its side and hauling back on the stick. Under Smith's careful instruction, I made the aircraft swap ends by canting the nose up to 55 degrees off the horizontal and slowing, then applying full left stick and full left rudder. The simulated jet slewed and spun crazily; it was awesome.

After leveling out from the 40,000 foot-per-minute dive the end-swapping maneuver resulted in, I flipped the aircraft inverted and looked up at the virtual world spread out above my head. "How long can we fly like this before bad things happen?" I asked Smith.

"The NATOPS limits are ten seconds of inverted gee," said Smith, "so you’ve got ten seconds, and that’s an engine oil limitation."

"So will the sim catch me if I do that?" I asked.

"I don’t know," he replied. "I’ve never tried it."

I happily held my inverted attitude, zooming along upside down at increasing speeds. The only thing that happened was that my right arm began to ache from having to apply a large amount of forward-pressure on the stick to hold the nose at the horizon. Apparently, inverted-flying oil fires weren’t programmed into the simulator, and I cackled at having figured out a way to beat the machine. Unbeknownst to me, while I was occupied keeping the plane upside down and feeling smug, Smith had ducked his head outside and asked the sim operator to blow up one of my engines.

Smith asked me to slip the headset on in case any alarms sounded, and I did so. "I’m just flying upside down," I said. "I do this all the time—oh my God engine fire left!"

The plane’s warning system had begun blaring a loud alert tone through the headset, followed by a disturbingly calm female voice saying, "Engine fire left. Engine fire left." An ominous "LEFT FIRE" light lit up on the instrument panel.

"I broke the plane," I said to Smith, smugness gone. The warning siren whooped in my ear. Ha ha, it seemed to say. What are you going to do now, smartass?

"Yeah, you can see the fire light came on, and you’ve got 'left EGT high' as your caution there"—he pointed to another warning light—"EGT is your exhaust gas temperature. So what you would do—you don’t have to do it, this is a simulator and we can undo anything we do, but you’d normally take the left throttle and shut it off."

I reached for the left-most throttle, currently up against the forward stop, and jammed it all the way back, then up and over the rear detent into the off position. My aircraft was in trouble, and it was my responsibility to save it. The words of Principal Strickland in Top Gun echoed in my head: "You don’t own that plane, the taxpayers do!" I was going to bring this bird home or die trying.

"Now reach up and hit the fire light—you have to lift the cover and push the button. That secures fuel to that engine. Then you see the ready light over there that came on—that’s the fire extinguisher. You hit that and blow halon out through the—there, yep, you’ve done it." I’d jammed my thumb onto the switch and saved the day. We were going to make it, Goose. We were going to make it.

Smith explained a bit about how the engine fire extinguisher works: there’s a single bottle of halon, and a Y-pipe with two valves that direct the halon to the engine with the fire. I asked what if there was a fire in both engines and realized even as the words were leaving my mouth that it was a dumb question: if both engines are on fire, you’re flying a $61 million brick. "I actually know a guy who shut both engines off in the sim one time," said Smith. "He had to do that exercise over again."

Having averted the immediate crisis and put out the fire, I ran immediately into another issue. "The, uh, plane feels really weird now," I said, wiggling the stick. The aircraft suddenly felt like it didn’t want to hold the course I was giving it, sliding sluggishly to the left no matter what I did.

"It’s got a good bit of yaw, yeah," explained Smith, "because you’ve got military power on the right, but if you look at the left, RPM is at 20." My 450-knot airspeed was keeping the left engine’s turbine slowly turning, which was helping to keep hydraulic pressure up for the plane’s systems, but it had become really difficult to control. I had some success with the trim switch on top of the control stick, but it was pretty obvious my poor Super Hornet wasn't going to make it in its current condition. Sorry, taxpayers.