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Long article with other things other than 'training' NOT excerpted below so go there for all of it....
F-35 Program Ramps Up Training for Pilots, Technicians
December 2015 Stew Magnuson
"The F-35 joint strike fighter program is transitioning to a day when its pilots will come fresh out of flight school and the new jet fighter will be their first assignment.
The services’ cadre of pilots so far have been veterans of other programs such as the F-15, F-16, Harrier or A-10s, said Mike Luntz, director of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 training systems.
“Many of the pilots that we have trained to date have been the more experienced pilots,” he said in an interview. “They typically have over 1,500 hours, maybe up to 3,000 hours of actual flight time in other fighter aircraft.”
Lockheed Martin, in addition to being the builder of the aircraft, also has the contract to provide training for both pilots and maintainers, including classroom instruction, flight simulators for pilots and mock-up aircraft for technicians.
These new so-called “category-one” pilots will have only about 200 hours of flight time in T-38 trainers at flight school and will be asked to take control of the U.S. military’s newest 5th-generation aircraft, which currently cost a little more than $100 million each.
“They just got their wings and they’re ready to move from that trainer aircraft into that fighter aircraft,” Luntz said. Lockheed Martin is gearing up to support the first batch of these less experienced pilots at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina.
During their first flight in an F-35, they will have an instructor flying in tandem, but since the F-35s are all single-seaters, they will be on their own, he said.
“They don’t have as much experience with fighter aircraft so the concern is safety,” he said.
The general feedback Lockheed Martin has received from the experienced pilots who have flown the F-35 so far is that it is easier to handle than earlier generation fighters. The complexity comes in all the missions it must perform, Luntz said.
“In general, the pilot of the F-35 is going to transition from someone that is very proficient at flying a complex aircraft to flying something that is much easier to fly, but now they are focused much more on the mission and the advanced capabilities that the F-35 brings. [The pilot] is really more of an information manager and absorbing that information and making decisions based on the sensor fusion capabilities of the aircraft.”...
...Along with pilots, maintainers must be adequately trained for the program to move forward. They too begin with classroom work, but their simulators are computer-game based and done on desktops, Luntz said. They are given a number of scenarios where they must understand the joint technical data and all the maintenance procedures such as how to change a wheel.
The scenario allows them to select the tools and processes they need to change the wheel and tire, and then actually go perform that in the virtual system, Luntz said. If they don’t have the right tools, the system won’t let them proceed.
“So when they go to the aircraft for the first time they have complete familiarization with how to perform that procedure,” he said.
There are also mock-ups that allow the technicians to practice on parts of the F-35 without risking damage to the real aircraft.
The weapons load trainer lets them practice inserting munitions in the bomb bay doors.
The ejection system maintenance trainer is the full height of the actual canopy and is used by both the pilots and the maintainers.
Pilots use it for ingress and egress training — “how to get in and out of the cockpit without damaging themselves or the equipment,” Luntz explained. The technicians learn to maintain the ejection seat and the canopy. There are pyrotechnics involved in the seat, so it is a delicate process.
There are three more mock-ups in development, he said. One will teach how to remove and replace the integrated power pack. The other two are for removing and replacing the engine lift fan and maintaining the landing gear. They are slated to be delivered in the 2017 timeframe, he said. A total of 223 pilots and 2,322 maintainers have been trained as of early November, according to Lockheed Martin figures...."
Source: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ ... cians.aspx
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