Creating Requirements for Operational Safety Support Through Assessment of Flight-simulation Fidelity (CROSSTAFF)

Effective simulator-based training can dramatically increase safety margins when pilots are flying actual aircraft. However, the effectiveness of simulator-based training hinges on the fidelity with which simulators capture critical features of actual flight situations. Aptima proposes to develop measures of aviation simulator fidelity. Our approach involves identifying factors contributing to specific safety vulnerabilities, identifying the extent to which those factors can be replicated in current simulation platforms, identifying the data output capabilities of the simulator platform, and demonstrating how those data could be used to produce meaningful measures of simulation fidelity – that is, measures of the extent to which the simulation captures the critical features related to safety in actual flight. Our development of measures will be accelerated by the use of Aptima’s existing suite of performance measurement techniques and tools, which have been applied to training and training simulations for the Navy, Marines, and Air Force.