A Vital Topic... Deserving Of NASA's Attention (and YOURS)

Late last year, ANN's Aero-TV crews spied a truly marvelous piece of flight simulation technology... NASA Glenn's icing flight training simulator. Demonstrated at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), we were incredibly impressed at the apparent accuracy of the model (ANN's Jim Campbell has plenty of Twin Otter time -- the aircraft used in the icing encounter sim model -- and knows only too well that the icing behavior they displayed is what he has experienced, personally, in real icing conditions).

The high-fidelity simulation model for icing effects flight training was developed from wind tunnel data for the DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft. First, a flight model of the un-iced airplane was developed and then modifications were generated to model the icing conditions.

The models were validated against data records from the NASA Twin Otter Icing Research flight test program with only minimal refinements being required. The goals of this program were to demonstrate the effectiveness of such a simulator for training pilots to recognize and recover from icing situations and to establish a process for modeling icing effects to be used for future training devices.

NASA notes that 'Developing flight simulators that incorporate the aerodynamic effects of icing will provide a critical element in pilot training programs by giving pilots a pre-exposure of icing-related hazards, such as ice-contaminated roll upset or tailplane stall. Integrating these effects into training flight simulators will provide an accurate representation of scenarios to develop pilot skills in unusual attitudes and loss-of-control events that may result from airframe icing.'

ANN first saw this technology demonstrated at I/ITSEC, an organization that promotes cooperation among the Armed Services, Industry, Academia and various Government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs, identification of common training issues and development of multiservice programs. The 2008 rendition of this event comes this December 1-4, 2008.

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