“Two things are outstanding in the recent development of naval aviation training. They are the development of special devices known within the service as synthetics and the development of operational training. Synthetic devices . . . have added tremendously to the efficient training of naval aviators, bombardiers, gunners, etc., and are the equivalent of hundreds of hours of additional training in the conventional manner. The invention, development, and production of synthetics has been short of miraculous. They are universally accepted by the services.”
—Report of House Naval Affairs Subcommittee to Investigate the Naval Air Training Program.
No period in history has witnessed technological advances comparable to those initiated by World War II. Following the last conflict, starting with the extensive research which transformed Germany during her period of rearmament, virtually every scientific and engineering agency in the world has been called upon to scheme for war, invent new weapons—convert our greatest discoveries to instruments of destruction, whatever the cost. The military machine, backed by unlimited expenditure, has produced new war equipment at a rate never before equaled.
If the veil of secrecy could be lifted from the results of this gigantic effort, we might realize that the rubbing of Aladdin’s lamp might have been less work, but its yield could hardly have been more prolific. What can be formulated can be made, and it goes without saying that American industry can turn it out in quantity. There remains an all important consideration: Can people be trained to use what we create?
Here we have a major problem, particularly in aviation, where progress has been so rapid that it is now the human brain, our mental and physical processes, which must be accelerated to keep up with development. The strut and wire “flying machines” of 1918 have evolved into complex structures of metal harnessed to thousands of horsepower, capable of spanning seas and continents, hauling huge cargoes of destruction over distant enemy territory, climbing into the stratosphere, and navigating without visibility. Equipped with radio communication and navigation devices, computing bomb- sights and gunsights, machine guns, cannon, torpedoes, rockets—all this and more—yet in the last analysis such equipment is of little value unless average human beings can be taught their control and operation.
An astonishing picture this, of technology turned loose to rove without limit, produce miracles. Then, with a casual gesture the product of countless brains, mechanical genius, and consummate skill is turned over to youngsters barely out of school to make good the potentialities of some of the most intricate mechanisms ever produced. It might almost be said: “And a little child shall operate them.”
Strangely enough, the boys are doing it. But how? They do so through methods of training devised by the same type of ingenuity and technical application which has been devoted to the creation of new weapons, but as yet it is just a beginning. We were late in realizing that regardless of our resources, our national courage and ideals, our ability as a people to make war rests largely on individual technical skill. Along with the strides made in new armaments, the youth and inexperience of our fighting men must be taken into account, and the urgency and magnitude of the task of training fully realized.
There was a time when minutemen, militia, and privateers with letters of marque were effective. Today all the courage and devotion in the world will not avail against shrewd, well-armed, well-trained opponents. Look back at Poland, Norway, and other invaded states. War has become incredibly complex—its requirements of industry, and its scope of operations are now too vast to remain a mere battle between armies. There is need for management, logistics, and organization commensurate with the range and power of our new weapons. Decisive battles may be fought anywhere. Their outcome is felt everywhere.
We are learning that we must train as a nation, that we must learn to wage war as an entire people, in communities, in factories, as well as in the services. Time is always short. We must not only learn our new duties but find new ways of comprehending them, better ways of teaching the use of the tools now made available by our technicians. Above all, we must make good our heritage in aviation. This begins with the training of our flyers, their navigators, radiomen, gunners, ground crews, all the thousands needed to keep our planes in the air—teaching them not merely to fly, but how to use their ability to fly, and what to do with this magic carpet they now possess.
The quickest way to finish this war we have on our hands is to train our lads to make good what our science and engineering have already achieved and can produce. With skill to match our superior equipment they will not only dispose of the enemy more quickly, but they will have a far better chance of surviving—a goal which is close to our hearts and vital to the nation.
The war in the air is being fought by youth—for youth alone is physically qualified. We take youngsters out of school and college, necessarily unprepared by experience and knowledge to operate the intricate and powerful modern aircraft or to carry out the complex and far-reaching missions dictated by today’s air warfare. Realization of the potential value of this equipment cannot be hoped for unless we find a means of instruction sufficiently rapid to keep up with the rising tide of technological advancement. The task of teaching young men new subjects and skills never has been a simple matter and to teach them what they must know to become competent airmen in a short time appeared to be almost an impossible one.
In the ordinary processes of education, boys are given five or six years of preparatory schooling, and then four years of college during the period they mature. For the most part, we have considered that the making of friends and the opportunity to grow up with athletics and certain social influences are part of their education. Certainly we have never considered heretofore that a boy when graduated from college was prepared to face a task anything so vital as mortal combat with a shrewd and fanatical enemy bent on his destruction. If he is to be tossed from school into a world of war, where the effectiveness of his learning is to be tested with his life as a stake, a new system of instruction is required. The lack of time precludes long theoretical study and the opportunity for digesting knowledge acquired by the usual academic processes. There has not been, there is no time for him to obtain his concepts from words alone. In the main, the type of education needed must be factual: the student must learn to do first, and theorize afterwards. Yet he must not be launched into the air without thorough working knowledge of his equipment.
It is this concept, this urgent need, that pointed the way to so-called “synthetic training” in naval aviation—ground training . in which operational conditions are reproduced so that airmen can learn their tasks factually and practice them under the conditions they will meet in flight and combat. It can be and is now applied in many other fields of technical training, but it has been most highly developed in the rapidly expanding Naval Air Training Program. Synthetic training is not a substitute for flight instruction, but a supplement to it so effective that it is essential.
The name “synthetic,” borrowed from the British, is not a particularly apt one. It does not mean the study of assembling parts of planes or machines, but reproduction and integration of flight conditions so that students can train and practice their mission as though they were in the air. It achieves the impossible in that a flight problem may be frozen for study of the difficulty of the moment, before it slips through the mind unsolved. The reaction of students is closely observed under the stress of complicated procedures against time. It arranges at will conditions that might be sought in vain from nature during long periods of training and flight instruction, conditions which will only too surely turn up sometime in service. It allows the resumption of study on an interrupted problem from the point it was broken off. Experts can test new methods of navigation or review little-used or routine details they wish to recall; beginners can concentrate upon their controls without the paralyzing distraction of actual flight, but with all its incidental effects and reactions; crews can build up co-ordination before taking off together. Synthetic training combines the fundamental with every type of circumstantial variation. The instructor’s ability to study the student’s reactions to all situations either by direct observation or from statistics automatically recorded, enables him to do far more in the way of teaching.
To teach a man how to fly you must put him in the air; but to teach him what to do with his flying once he is aloft is another story, and that is largely a ground job. Radio, navigation, gunnery, bombing, the handling of engines, procedure, recognition, missions, etc., are best learned on the ground and best practiced in the air. Otherwise flight time is wasted and vital knowledge unabsorbed. The aviator and crewman must know how to navigate, to shoot, to recognize atmospheric conditions. He must know radio, homing devices, code. He must acquire a knowledge of the sea and ships because he operates with them, and sometimes on them. His education on how to use his plane, in addition to his knowledge of flying, is broad, versatile, and exacting. His powerful weapons must be used to the best advantage, and his three-dimensional navigation calls for extraordinary discipline and initiative; qualities that must not be allowed to neutralize each other.
One series of synthetic training devices, for example, teaches free gunners to shoot by means of flashes of light boresighted with dummy guns. The students aim at images of attacking enemy planes projected upon a cinema screen, while by synchronized film the correct points of aim can likewise be made to appear at will. Here the actual aim which will yield a hit is recorded and scores made to give a measure of the gunner’s competency.
Another device, again by the use of a screen and picture target, teaches fighter pilots to shoot at enemy planes. Sky and land and sea swirl about in space as the fighter maneuvers to keep his prey under fire, and there is an uncanny effect of reality. Yet the greatest value of the device lies in the ability of the instructor to observe and correct his student and emphasize what he should practice in the air.
Other devices permit entire crews to carry out missions under identically the same circumstances and conditions they can expect to encounter in the air. As they theoretically navigate on patrol they are subjected to variations of wind and weather, practice obtaining radio bearings, determine drift, sight and identify convoys, contact the enemy, return to the home base. Still another phase of synthetic training teaches students operation and maintenance of equipment by use of animated drawings and mockups, or dummy constructions, which show how every part functions.
The Link Celestial Navigation Trainer, among the Navy’s most elaborate pieces of training mechanisms, is contained in an air- conditioned housing nearly 50 feet high, complete with 20 or more collimated stars in the domed sky above. Landscapes are projected on a screen below, and simulate altitudes ranging from low levels to over 30,000 feet. Ground speed and wind drift can be varied. When sextant shootings of mist-dimmed stars are made from the mockup plane, there is more than the average test of the navigator’s technique. (It is described in detail on pp. 527-30 of the May, 1944, issue of the U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings in an article by Lieutenant D. B. Whiting, U. S. Naval Reserve.) Perhaps the most advanced synthetic trainer has recently been completed by the Navy and put into operation in the Operational Training Command. It is known as the Operational Flight Trainer. It comprises an exact replica of a multi-engine patrol plane in which all of the controls are operative and produce coordinated reactions. The machine is flown by a pilot and a co-pilot in exactly the same manner as the actual airplane. It has provision for the navigator, radioman, and flight engineer who operate their equipment in exactly the same manner as they would in the air. The result of the handling of the controls is manifested on the instrument panel and on an instructor’s panel which is provided with duplicate instruments to show every action of the student crew. The coordination between all instruments is effected by an electronic computing machine which solves all the equations of flight and produces the answer on the instruments and the reaction of the controls and engine operation. The theoretical path of the flight is recorded on a chart on the instructor’s table and the track of the aircraft is plotted automatically according to the theoretical course of the flight. Variable winds, ice, and load factors can be imposed at will by the instructor so the crew may be given complete missions and be briefed and carry out their assignment in exactly the same manner so that when in the air the only assumption is a night or instrument flight.
Combinations of several devices can be made to train crews in any proportions. One of the most realistic of all is the Bombing Trainer. Kneeling in the nose of a simulated bomber, the student hears the sound of his motors and sees below him, hidden at times by clouds and mist, a landscape or seascape on which he can locate his target. Bombing runs are made on it as with the real plane, the release pressed at the calculated correct moment, and shortly after a hit-indicator shows by a flash of light on the screen just where the simulated bombs have fallen, and which have reached the target.
Few people realize that flying skill now constitutes only part of the education of the airman—basic, of course, but actually no more essential than his ability to navigate to an objective, or to use his weapons effectively which is the very purpose of flying. It was with these considerations in view that the Bureau of Aeronautics set up the synthetic training program under the Special Devices Division and has pressed its development at a pace seldom seen, even in wartime. It had authorized expenditures of nearly two million dollars for experiment before Pearl Harbor, and since that time more than a hundred million dollars has been provided by the services for research and production of training equipment. Today the Division carries out research and engineering not only for naval aviation but for the Army Air Forces as well, and has produced training devices on a major scale for both services. This equipment is effectively teaching pilots, crews, and maintenance men what to do by doing it.
When the clouds of war clear away, the effects of synthetic training on education and instruction will inevitably manifest themselves—not necessarily to shorten the period of education in the lives of our young men, but to make it count for more. A great opportunity lies ahead to make teaching more interesting and vital. Let us give our children a clearer and truer concept of the physical world they live in. A higher level of knowledge will serve us in good stead through the difficult reconstruction years of a war-torn world. It may prove to be more effective to the preservation of our way of life than trade agreements and treaties.