Spaz,
Some good stuff there, thank you. It pretty much backs up what we have beenseeing thus far and demonstrates that they are making good use of the currenttechnologies and capabilities. Some cutting edge, but most not exactlynew.
That said, one of the very important issues here stems from a comment madeearlier regarding F-22 training and the difficulty in finding willingadversaries due to the lop-sided nature of the affiliation - a factor that wecould expect to be equally relevant for F-35 (at least it better be!). Also limitations on using 'the full capabilities' in public. A vital point here is that using one's own high tech platforms as live trainingadversaries has a lot of negative connotations. In other words, you probablywouldn't want to use, say, F-22 to go up against F-35 for reasons largelybeyond the scope of this forum. So the simulator becomes the obvious place totrain against potential adversaries, platforms other than one's own and theones that JSF should be designed to go against. All of that is well withincurrent simulator capabilities, including computer generated virtual adversaries.
Similarly, the fidelity of the modelling of flight characteristics is easilygood enough today to introduce pilots to aircraft handling and a lot of keyevents - in truth, we've been doing that for a long time now to very goodeffect. Indeed, flight modelling is so good it can also allow pilots toexperience regimes of the flight envelope that would be prohibited in liveflight.
All of that accepted, there remains the issue of establishing where the'floor' (as LO called it) is positioned. And the concern I was raising earlierremains; regardless of how many flight hours (live, not synthetic) nations havebudgeted for, there will always be pressure to try to save money by transferringmore hours to the simulators. Whilst I fully support the maximum use ofsynthetic training devices, I would always caution against over-blown claimsthat we can make simulators so realistic that they can fully take the place oflive flying.