RAF fights jet shortage with virtual wingmen

Trainee pilots in the RAF will no longer need their wingman for mock dogfights as they will fly in the sky with virtual comrades and foes as part of plans to solve a shortage of jets and prepare more aviators for battle.
In the coming months, pilots will fly on Hawk T2 advanced jet training aircraft wearing visors fitted with an augmented reality system that enables them to see virtual images in the sky from anywhere in the world.
Fake surface-to-air missiles will target them, as will virtual enemy aircraft. They will also be able to train alongside virtual wingmen, saving the use of support aircraft needed in the skies all at once.
“If I’m up there and I’m doing dog fighting … now I can just go, ‘Bang, reset’ and I’ve got a wingman right there and we are ready to go and we can fly again,” said the former RAF fighter pilot Daniel Robinson, the chief executive and founder of the American company Red 6, which has developed the Advanced Tactical Augmented Reality System (Atars).
The augmented reality visor will be demonstrated on a Hawk jet by October in partnership with BAE Systems. RAF personnel will then decide how to use the technology.
RAF Group Captain Ryan Morris, the assistant head of plans for military flying training, said it was a novel technology: “It’s exactly what we should be going after … to make sure we stay right on the cutting edge of training.”
Britain spends millions of pounds a year to send pilots overseas for training because the RAF does not have enough fast-jet training aircraft available.
The Times reported in March how problems with the Hawk T2 jets have resulted in less than half of the fleet being available for training in the UK because they cannot fly for too long without the engines “blowing up”. As a result, the Ministry of Defence is having to pay the United States and Italy as much as £55 million over the next three years, around £2 million per pilot, to train them instead.
A fault within the engine of the jets has meant each aircraft can only fly for 1,700 hours, instead of the expected 4,000 hours, before it needed to be replaced. Although there are 28 Hawk T2 jets in the fleet, of which around 20 were planned to be available daily, only about eight of them were available each day throughout 2022-2023.
Morris said the new technology solved part of the issue of the RAF not having enough hours available on the jets to deliver the training necessary. He said it meant he believed they would now be able to deliver enough pilots for the RAF.
“What I don’t want to do is take hours away from those brand-new training pilots because, as we know, flying aircraft is important … I’ve now got fake aircraft that are flying with them,” he said.
Morris, who was speaking in a briefing to journalists last month, suggested he could train pilots faster because he could “put more virtual assets up when I’ve got limited assets available”.
The pilot could choose to have a simulated real-world environment where they appeared to be on a dangerous mission flying through mountains, or they could be carrying out a task such as air-to-air refuelling. “I can look out of my window, through my visor, and see an airplane that isn’t really there. It can be anything you want. Nobody else is doing that,” added Robinson.