Six years ago, as a procurement agent for the U.S. Air Force’s F-15C Distributed Mission Training System, Col. Mike Chapin observed that air crews didn’t care much for simulators. They’d rather be flying.

“To them, simulators were something to avoid at all costs,” said Chapin, who recently retired from the Air Force as the director of the Training Systems Product Group at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. “But after flying high-fidelity F-15C trainers and experiencing the realism, pilots come out saying ‘Wow! These are great.’ At some locations they’re actually fighting to get more simulator time.”

Boeing, through its Logistics Support Systems business, builds F-15 Distributed Mission Training Centers in St. Louis and delivers them around the globe. These simulators are part of the Air Force’s Distributed Mission Operations (DMO) concept, an ambitious effort to link training simulators throughout the Air Force in a network. DMO enables crews such as F-15 and F-16 pilots and mission crews on AWACS to train together from their home bases. Chapin believes DMO will expand to include all the services and even some U.S. allies.

“In the Air Force, at Boeing and at other defense contractors, there are great people doing great things that are making a difference in the way we train our airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines to fight and defend our nation,” he said.

DMO has made great strides, considering where it started. Unlike traditional simulator operations, which are owned by the Air Force, the service took a different tack when it came to the F-15C mission training centers, which the colonel refers to as the “flagships” for DMO. For those, the Air Force entered into a long-term services contract with Boeing. By contracting for services and not the hardware, the Air Force and Boeing shaved two years off the normal acquisition time, according to Chapin.

DMO is not limited to fighters. During a recent virtual flag simulation-based exercise, a C-17 crew worked with the Army to evacuate wounded soldiers from behind enemy lines. The crew decided they couldn’t land safely and aborted the mission. It turned out that a difference in Army and Air Force terminology caused confusion on the actual length of the runway, and that in reality the crew could have landed safely. The situation probably could have been avoided with on-the-ground mission rehearsal. Finding these types of inter-service differences in training missions will save lives on the battlefield, explained Chapin.

Air Mobility Command is now fully on board with DMO, realizing the place to make and learn from mistakes is in a training environment, according to Chapin, not in the heat of battle, when your training should take hold and helps save lives. (See related story on C-17 crew).

Chapin called C-17 training, “a model of how to train on a full motion simulator.” Based on the commercial air crew training model, the vast majority of C-17 crew training is accomplished in the simulator, meeting the warfighters objective of minimizing the use of the actual aircraft for training.

“We’re really excited about what Boeing is doing with the new C-17 Aircrew Training System being installed at March Air Reserve Base,” Chapin said. “It will be the first large aircraft full-motion simulator to use all electronic motion bases versus hydraulics. It will greatly lower lifecycle costs for the Air Force.” And in the end, greater readiness at a lower cost is what the Air Force and the Department of Defense wants.

“Future training systems must be cheaper and deployable. By deployable, we mean when the unit packs up and deploys to an austere location, they take their training systems with them,” said Chapin, adding that advances in technology will make it possible.

“I’ve seen what Boeing and others are working on,” he continued. “In a few years you’ll find that training systems consist of a pilot in a G-suit, with a video-capable helmet and immersive gloves. It’s not that far off.”