On Sunday 18 January 2004 09:48 pm, Tony Nixon wrote: > There is a controller station and up to 3 student stations and all > communicate in a token ring type of arrangement. I did college studies years ago at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. They had purchased a similar (but much larger) system for training commercial pilots using FAA-qualified simulators from Frasca and an ATC simulation system from a company I don't remember. > All plane positions, frequencies and a ton of other 'stuff' is thrown > around the ring so that each PC knows what the other is doing. They can > then display relative positions, detect collisons and provide info for > a psuedo radio link. Neat. Similar to the system they had. They had audio circuits running from the "aircraft" to various headset plug-in points around the lab and standard push-to-talk switches worked in all of them. There were ten "channels" which someone had taken the time to put lables on with "frequencies" that could be used. These plugins were also at the "workstations" for controllers and also instructor monitoring stations. Their goal was to not only train pilots but also to train folks who sit on the "other side" of the radar scopes. The ATC "simulation" put the "real" planes (simulators) and other traffic up for the controllers to work. > The PIC can also connect the PC sound card output to a station headset > and thus the students can seperately receive a vocal ATIS transmission > which the PC generates from parameters setup by the controller. This > gives info before "landing or departing" at one of two major airports. > There is also a selection of morse codes for identifying a number of > ADF and VOR stations. These are all real frequencies and codes taken > from nav documents (The ERSA here in OZ). The controller station is > manned (or womanned) by a senior instructor or CFI and acts as an area > controller or Tower controller which the students can talk to in real > time as they "fly" or taxi around a controlled airport. Automated announcements were not part of their system. I wished at the time we had a way to record an ATIS loop or similar so the controller wasn't responsible for simulating that or worse, following the controller's handbook and giving WX information to every aircraft that didn't have it. We ended up skipping that a lot by asking the instructors to tell their class the day's "weather" and having them say on initial call-up they had "Information X-Ray". I spent many hours on the scopes outside of classwork because the instructors appreciated having controllers for the "pilots" to talk to, and there weren't as many classes of ATC folks as there were people in the sims. That and I was fascinated with the technology, and I enjoyed helping make the simulation more "real" -- it only meant that realistic radio distractions in the real-world were more expected and understood by those in the "aircraft" and ultimately hopefully made a few safer pilots out of them. It also simulated real frequency congestion. (I always made calls to the "fake" aircraft "on the air" just like they were really there -- similar to when you hear a real controller operating on more than one frequency -- you only hear one side of their conversation. Many freshly minted and studying IFR students were surprised to hear these one-sided conversations and learned to LISTEN BEFORE THEY TRANSMITTED, because as a real controller would do, I would give them the ol' "Cessna 1234, standby. United 238 Heavy, turn left heading 080, decend and maintain niner-thousand. Do you have the airport in sight? United 238 Heavy, roger. Cleared visual approach Runway 8 Right, contact the Tower now, one-one-eight point niner. [Depending on if the "Cessna" made the proper call-up...] Cessna 1234, squawk 5212 and Ident." You can make the "radio" side of a simulation VERY realistic if you take the time to do it properly... and you get the added side-benefit of teaching the pilots to make their call-ups early and far enough out to get set up for their approaches properly. Call me at the outer marker inbound while I'm working on six other approaches, and you're gonna get "spun"... welcome to Mr. Holding Pattern boys! Just like the real world and the instructors usually permitted it, especially with advanced students. Obviously this is beyond the capabilities of the new students who haven't learned how to even fly a holding pattern yet, so you had to be a bit flexible. I had one funny guy who didn't know how to fly a hold one time just declare an "emergency"! LOL... that was pretty creative of him! He knew my rules as well as I knew his!!) > The controller can also enable/disable any of the student instruments > and set meteorological conditions, wind, cloud base etc. and home in on > any of the students positions to see track deviations etc. That's a cool feature. Our sims had no weather simulation capability at all other than turbulence (instruments bouncing around, but nothing like in the real aircraft where your butt also gets bounced around). Only one sim at the time was equipped with a "window" to work on transitions from Instruments to landing (and/or execute the missed approach procedure if the airport environment wasn't in sight at the appropriate time). Failing instruments was done by an instructor from a pod behind each sim. > The transponder, when squawked, brings up highlighted text on the > controllers screen next to the transmitting aircrafts position. Neat. Their system simulated a full controller's screen and standard FAA colorized keyboard and trackball for aircraft tagging and handoffs, etc. About the only thing they couldn't really afford to do was print flight strips for every "aircraft"... which would have given the controllers practice in dealing with a no-radar environment. > It also has an ILS approach. There's a big difference... all of the sims had hundreds of ILS's and other approaches in them. The vast majority of the training time was spent flying approaches over and over. Having an aircraft jump from the "airport" back to the inital-approach fix was always an interesting thing for the controller to deal with... heh... real airplanes don't do that! > The CFI at the club is quite eager to start using this and I believe he > may try to get CASA approval for having it as a training aid, possibly > a precursor to using the real simulator and for improving radio > procedures and IFR work. That's great. I would recommend that whoever's doing the comms training really be good at following standardized phraseology and push it HARD during training. Listening to most Center frequencies in the U.S. is a daily reminder (by professional pilots no less) about how NOT to use radios. 20-50% of the air time is taken up by guys asking for "ride reports" and the like, which if they'd just listen for ten minutes they'd know everything they needed to know... either they're at an altitude that others are asking to get away from or they're not. What a waste of hot air. United pilots are absolutely the worst about it. > I'm holding my breath for the flood of, "Hey! Do you reckon you could > get it to ......", and bugs ;-) Just watching from the sidelines here... looks like a really neat project Tony. -- Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body