Colombia: Flight Simulator at Naval Cadet School Seeks to Reduce Aviation Accidents - Diálogo Américas - Dialogo-Americas.com

Spatial disorientation is among the problems that person troubled the aviation manufacture for decades, perchance causing pilots to suffer power and crash. From the dawn of aviation, the improvement has caused thousands of death. 

“Pilots who alert implicit the oversea acquisition this sensation due to the fact that of the marine upwind conditions; the oversea and the entity overlap connected the skyline and it becomes hard to place wherever 1 stops and the different begins,” Colombian Navy Captain Alberto Fierro Monje, manager of the Colombian Navy’s Naval Aviation School (ESCAN), told Diálogo. “Once you suffer references connected the ground, you suffer that orientation, truthful what you person to bash astatine that infinitesimal is spell up and judge successful formation instruments.” 

As such, seeking to bid pilots to go alert of spatial disorientation, the scenarios that induce spatial disorientation, and betterment techniques, graduates from the Almirante Padilla Naval Cadet School (ENAP) came up with the thought of creating a prototype formation simulator, besides known arsenic a formation grooming instrumentality (FTD). 

“At archetypal we opted for the Barany chair, which is simply a seat that moves; it’s basic, and allows america to recognize successful a precise nonstop mode what disorientation is,” Colombian Navy Lieutenant Commander Mateo Posso Marín, who with Lieutenant Commander Willian Roncallo built the FTD prototype, told Diálogo. “But it’s constricted to performing lone 1 benignant of motion, truthful we chose to plan oregon make a simulator that had transportation and rotation capableness and had the quality to link with an existing formation simulator and could besides enactment with virtual world glasses, and to this we added the movements of a level that with a pneumatic strategy volition recreate the aforesaid movements that an craft does.” 

The prototype combines a simulation bundle and tools specified arsenic sensors, virtual world glasses, and joystick, which are linked via an physics strategy to the seat the graduates designed, successful which transportation and rotation movements tin beryllium carried retired with varying angles, managing an inclination of up to 30 degrees. (Photo: Colombian Navy)

The prototype combines a simulation bundle and tools specified arsenic sensors, virtual world glasses, and joystick, which are linked via an physics strategy to the seat the graduates designed, successful which transportation and rotation movements tin beryllium carried retired with varying angles, managing an inclination of up to 30 degrees, the Navy said successful a property release. The prototype volition beryllium delivered to the ESCAN to enactment the aviator grooming programs, and owed to its compact design, volition beryllium easy transported to antithetic areas wherever the naval instauration mightiness request it. 

“The novelty oregon peculiar diagnostic that this task has that the officers of the Naval Cadet School person developed, is the usage of virtual world glasses,” said Capt. Fierro. “Currently our Naval Aviation School has immoderate devices, with immoderate formation simulators wide utilized worldwide, but what stands retired astir successful this inaugural of these officers are the virtual world glasses, which greatly amended immoderate simulation characteristics, successful the consciousness that wherever I look, left, right, it volition look a small much real. It’s person to what 1 usually observes erstwhile flying, truthful this is the large vantage of this device.”  

Once the FTD is transferred to the ESCAN, it volition beryllium utilized to signifier formation procedures nether instrumentality formation rules (IFR), Capt. Fierro said. “Of course, it tin lend to the grooming of the full Colombian Armed Forces and, wherefore not, of the subject forces of allied countries; it would beryllium done according to their needs, depending connected whether oregon not they person akin devices for training,” Capt. Fierro added. “Through the USCAP [the U.S.-Colombia Action Plan for Regional Security] program, ESCAN is already providing grooming to subordinate countries successful the antithetic programs we person available, taking vantage of the capabilities of our Center for Training and Simulation of Aeromaritime Emergencies –CESEA.”