Thales awarded Queen’s commendation for RAF training

Thales’ services to the U.K. Royal Air Force, delivered bythe ACE Training and Simulation team, have been recognised in the 2019 Queen’sBirthday Honours list. The commendation was awarded in ‘recognition ofexceptional qualities and personal sacrifices in the service of others,’ afterforty years of providing training for Tornado fast jet pilots and crew.

The RAF has used the training and simulation servicesprovided by Thales for the Tornado multi-role combat aircraft from the day itentered service until the day it was finally retired.

Over its four decades of operational service, in whichnearly 1,000 aircraft were built (the last one left the factory in 1998), theTornado has seen action in the Gulf War of 1991, and in Libya, Kosovo,Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

The ACE team has provided and managed the buildings,infrastructure, engineers, instructors, administration staff, classroomfacilities, desktop training systems and three full flight simulators at RAFbases in Lossiemouth and Marham, clocking up more than 57,000 simulator flyinghours in 38,000 simulator sorties.

Other Thales personnel have played a crucial role, too, notleast by sacrificing their evenings and weekends to install a total of 75upgrades to the simulators (in advance of upgrades being installed in the realaircraft) to avoid any interruptions to training.

Thales has also provided training on the A400M transportaircraft, the Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker and the VC10, Tristar, C130,Harrier and Jaguar aircraft, and the Eurofighter Typhoon, and has notched upmore than 42,000 hours of simulation for potential fast jet pilots on theTucano trainer.

Every fighter pilot has to be trained to deal with extremeG-forces. 9G, which the early 1950s centrifuges used by trainee pilots canachieve, is enough to force blood away from the brain and into the legs,creating tunnel vision and blackouts. This allows the trainee to experience theuse of a G-suit and to practise anti-G Straining manoeuvres to diminish theblood-pooling effects of G. But the old-style centrifuges take nine seconds tospin fast enough to deliver 9G.

In combat, today’s fast jets can subject a pilot to high-Gin an instant, and it is essential that the pilot is ready to deal with this.Thales is meeting this need with an all-new High-G Training and Testingfacility, which was recently opened as part of a £44-million project at RAFCranwell in Lincolnshire. Its centrifuge can accelerate the occupant from 1.6Gto 9G in just one second.

The facility at Cranwell also features a flight simulator,with realistic out-of-the-window views, accurate displays and working flightcontrols, which the pilot can operate to ‘fly’ the machine. This lets the pilotexperience (and practise mitigating) the extreme physiological effects ofperforming sudden high-speed manoeuvres, such as the tight turns, which areused in dogfights and missile evasion, in complete safety.

The simulator can also perform a rapid transition frompositive to negative G (down to -3) to replicate one of the most common causesof G-LOC (G-induced Loss Of Consciousness), a dangerous condition in which thepilot blacks out. Forces as high as 12G can be also be created, in order totest equipment.

The Cranwell high-G simulator is the only facility of itskind in the U.K. and one of only three in the whole world.

The ‘brain’ of the simulator is software from  AMST. As well as giving the pilot the abilityto create and experience high-G manoeuvres, the simulator is linked to aninstructor’s station. This allows the pilot to fly against a virtual opponentin a dogfight, with the enemy aircraft being ‘flown’ by the instructor.

The simulator can be equipped and configured to replicatethe Hawk T2, the Eurofighter Typhoon and the RAF’s most recent fighter, the F35Lightning. Changing configurations takes 30 minutes.

Thales will continue to develop and enhance relationshipwith the RAF, improving the skills of pilots for the foreseeable future.