A July 2024 photo of the Navy's new desktop flight simulators at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division near Patuxent River, Maryland. U.S. Navy
As sims at sea help one carrier’s aviators stay sharp, the Navy wants more
Air Boss wants the rest of the strike group to get networked simulators as well.
Aviators aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have been using simulators to practice as a group at sea—and the Navy’s air boss wants to replicate that across the strike group and beyond.
“I send about 24 young warfighters down to the highest-classified room on the carrier…And they rehearse, and they train, and they are higher trained because of the sims at sea than ever before,” Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever, who leads Naval Air Forces, said during the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual training and simulation conference, or I/ITSEC. “What I need to do is integrate that training across the strike group and with every asset that comes out.”
The simulators use the Joint Simulation Environment, which was first designed for F-35 test and evaluation and has since been used for training at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada and Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Having the simulators at sea enables aviators to work through complex conditions that aren’t easily replicated during daily operations, Cheever said.
Live-virtual-constructive training “helps solve problems of scalability, complexity, and security,” said John Bell, chief technology officer for HII Mission Technologies, which supports the JSE.
“When you're flying off an aircraft carrier in routine day-to-day operations,” Bell said, “we don’t have a bunch of enemy aircraft flying around at will, and so being able to do it in a more complex training environment has been a problem that, in the last few years, has become much more critical than it used to be.”
Perhaps the most important reason to have simulators at sea is that they provide the ability to turn real-world scenarios into training missions.
“What's needed is to turn today's Red Sea, Ukraine lessons…into those simulations for tomorrow,” Cheever said. “If you can't turn it that fast, we're in trouble. So open architecture, fast. I've never seen anything as fast as what we've gotten to in the Red Sea, as far as learning goes. So that learning team, that's where we're heading as a force.”
Sims at sea could also help prepare pilots for future missions with uncrewed aircraft, as called for in the chief of naval operations’ navigation plan. The Navy is “putting unmanned control systems on every single aircraft carrier, because that's the future,” Cheever said.