It looks like the setting for some grandly baroque cyberpunk movie. Lawnmower Man meets Metropolis with a touch of old Soviet Industrial Film thrown in. A large metal ball mounted on gimbals at the end of a 50 foot cross-laced steel arm. Inside the ball, a mock up of aircraft flight controls; real aircraft and proposed aircraft, plus 3 monitors to simulate a pilot's forward view, and a lot of instruments and a video camera to monitor pilot reactions. The ball, which is actually the gondola of the centrifuge, can be accelerated up to 40 Gs, far past the tolerance of any known aircraft (or pilot). And powering this assemblage, inside the drum that the arm rotates from and around, a motor scavenged from an old 1950s steel mill; 180 tons of motor with a 4,000 horsepower output that needs its own power plant to run.
This combination of High-Tech, Low-Tech and Old-Tech is the heart of the Dynamic Flight Simulator at the Naval Warfare Center in Warminster, PA, where the Navy simulates and tests, people and equipment, both of which must function under (often) extreme conditions.
In the civilian world of VR business a project is handled by what it might cost to do, or whether the technology is available to do it, and, to a degree, whether it will be safe for the end- user. But civilian end-users will not ordinarily find themselves travelling at supersonic speed, or engaging hostile enemy fire, or having to eject from a stricken aircraft and endure the 15 plus G thrust of an ejection seat. When the Navy puts that word "Dynamic" in front of the flight simulator, they really mean it. At the speed levels modern jet fighters attain there aren't many second chances.
Civilian programmers and engineers do not face the multiple tests that are required for anything to work in a high perfor mance fighter aircraft. "We come in because the government cannot afford to waste highly trained pilots and very expensive aircraft because of some glitch that would have been caught if only someone had taken a look at it." says Gregory Reh, Program Manager for the Helmet Advanced Technology Team. In his group Reh uses an articulated total body model developed by the Air Force to try to determine physiological impacts of changes or redesign of existing or proposed equipment. In his area Reh has to consider such factors as performance of a device, integration and interfacing with existing systems, physiological impacts in the immediate environment of a high performance jet and the safety factors involved in any ejection, crash or high impact landing as well as the logistics of supporting and maintaining any new system. A look at some other problems and situations the various teams at Warminster have dealt with gives an idea of the complexity of the testing and simulations that the facility works on.
