Dances with Boffins
Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Heathrow Airport etc have nothing to do with Uncle Sam and they are just a handful of a huge number of countries that have adopted and proven the value of 3D simulation. However for those systems with labor intensive human pseudo pilots or very poorly implemented speech recognition (DVI), achieving a high level of intensity in a realistic fashion is very difficult. Pseudo Pilots are only capable of processing ATC commands in a serial manner and ATC requires a mechanism that can deal with rapid command instructions without having to wait for the poor pseudo pilot to catch up.
Training in the real tower, I agree that this is of course more realistic and everyone would prefer to talk to real traffic, but this approach has a number of serious flaws. The throughput in a real tower of trainees is very much limited by availability of traffic, number of instructors and number of trainees you are trying to qualify. It is also not possible to determine if the level and complexity of live traffic will be suitable for the actual level of competency of a trainee at a specific time. Too much traffic when the student is not ready for it is actually detrimental to good learning and progress.
New trainees should not be dropped straight into the 3D Tower but when they reach a certain level of competency (through other means such as CBT, Classroom study and single seat 2D or 3D trainers), the 3D Tower is much more efficient as the amount, complexity and quality of traffic can be precisely tailored for the competency level of a specific student.
As for Uncle Sam, the FAA did an 18 month study with 4 systems located at Chicago, Miami, Ontario and Phoenix before deciding to expand the project and there are numerous documented studies showing the benefits of 3D simulation.
Having said all of that, no simulator is perfect, there are always things that can be improved. For what its worth (and since you don't know me, you have every right to dismiss this) in my opinion, the technology exists today that would permit the development of a realistic tower simulator that could take students from new entry to very close to certification without stepping in the real tower. The components all exist (Speech Recognition, Intelligent Agents, Photo Realsitic High Resolution Graphics etc). This capability could be developed for relatively little money compared to what could be saved through reduced training time.
It doesn't exist today because no one so far has been willing to fund it and no simulator company has done a sufficient marketing job to convince any of the training organizations to believe it is possible. It is however coming and much like the fact that a pilot can qualify to captain an aircraft through zero flight time simulation, without having flown in the real one, in a few years controllers will be qualifying without having spoken to a real aircraft.
Please don't read this as me preaching, I am just very excited and passionate about ATC and what technology can bring to the table. It's easy to get carried away.
Last edited by ruslan124; 16th Apr 2008 at 17:34.