Imagine being tasked with landing an aircraft in a way that’s never been attempted before, on a carrier you've never seen. Now imagine that aircraft is a 1,199mph, $100 million jet, and the carrier is the £3.1 billion, 280-metre-long pride of the Royal Navy. Even seasoned pilots with a constitution of graphene might take issue with that prospect. So they come to a small Lancashire village to practice what is not yet a reality.
Here, in Warton, the ocean undulates with hypnotic rhythm all around us. It would be soothing if it were not for that jet engine roaring beneath us, seeming to echo off the waters. It’s the sound of BAE Systems’ £2 million F-35B simulator, a highly secretive (WIRED was not allowed to photograph the control screen) and realistic training model finished in February for British pilots who come here to practice landings. The massive curved 360-degree screens fill the domed room around the ‘jet’, completing the oceanic mirage. Shipborne rolling vertical landings (SRVL) have never been attempted with the F-35B, and cannot be attempted until the HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier - the future home of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force fleet of F-35Bs - is unveiled in 2018.
“The only place you can do it right now is here, in this facility, where we get to see the ship and the aircraft in intricate detail,” Pete 'Wizzer' Wilson, BAE Systems’ test pilot, tells WIRED. His job is to make sure the simulator is as close to the real thing as possible, and he’s uniquely equipped to do this as a test pilot of the F-35B and F-35C which he's been flying out of Maryland in the US for the past six years. So far, he's having trouble finding fault with it.
“There have been some minor things - the guys are working from drawings and diagrams so we have this disconnect between what they do with the drawings and what I’ve seen with the real thing, because, of course, it’s highly restricted - you can’t just go look into the F-35 cockpit.”
In particular, Wilson says the best bits of flying the F-35B can’t be fully replicated in the simulator; the thrill of hovering alongside a ship, for instance, is Wilson’s favourite part and can only be appreciated in the real world. The dome, however, does allow test pilots to focus on scenes at a greater distance than most simulators and provides realistic details in their peripheral vision - waves, for instance, and other visual and audio cues - that can make the worst parts of supersonic jet flight seem unforgivingly real.
“You can become so immersed in it, it's like a virtual reality. You believe you’re there, that’s the power of a simulator of this quality. It’s quite awesome, quite effective, quite emotional,” continues Wilson.
“Crashing an aeroplane is a hideous thing for a pilot to even contemplate but we occasionally end up with a situation where we are going to crash [in the simulation] and I’ll see the engineers with eyes wide open watching the crash. I can’t do it. I can’t watch the crash. I close my eyes and I shy away because I can’t watch it, because it’s so real it’s like I’m just about to die, even though I’m in the simulator.”
The simulator is designed to let pilots practice, over and over, the hardest parts of their takeoff and landing on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, to mitigate those risks. It also helps with the more mundane aspects of navigating around a 280-metre-long carrier and its many moving parts, and the details of how all the communications networks onboard will eventually work together.
“We focus on the areas where we think the risk is greatest or there is most to be learnt,” says Wilson. “Most of the time we’re testing the final stages of that SRVL landing with a lot of ship motion, that’s really the majority of the time. Different configurations of weapons, friction on the flight deck where it’s slippery, oil that can still contaminates this new surface.” (As of 29 March, Wilson and the rest of the team have finished testing the simulator, and it is now ready for F-35 pilots to begin this training.)
The F-35 is built to do a short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL), the move previously made infamous in the Royal Navy by the Harrier jet, which Wilson also flew. He has 100 vertical landings under his belt as a former Royal Navy pilot, but the British forces have opted for a far riskier, but ultimately more rewarding, type of landing. Vertical landings, where the jet comes in at a hover and gradually touches down, work by using all the aircraft’s thrust. But the jet is capable of a finite amount of thrust, which means there is a finite amount of weight it can support in the air while doing this. The result is that US F-35s operating the vertical landing are either carrying less weaponry during training exercises, or dropping munitions in the sea before coming back in to land.
“The UK decided it wanted to be able to bring back a higher level of payload than the F-35B can hover with, which is quite a major problem because it was not designed to do that,” says Wilson. “So we had to come up with a new type of manoeuvre.” The SRVL works by keeping ‘forward speed’ on, so the wings are operating to provide some lift. “The Americans have decided they don’t need to employ this new type of landing yet but I think it’s a matter of time before they will start deploying similar capabilities. Over the years, America has adopted many of our inventions, way back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. They are very much reliant on many of our inventions, and this may be a similar case.”
This is a good justification for what has been one of the most anticipated - and oft times most controversial - pieces of equipment in modern military history. Anticipated because the F-35 is slated to replace the majority of the US airforce’s fleet and form the centrepiece of the UK’s Royal Navy and Royal Air Force from 2018. Controversial because of the cost and delays associated with it. Globally, it has been reported the F-35 project will cost $1.5 trillion in its lifetime, with the UK's order of 138 F-35s running into tens of billions of pounds. This makes it the most expensive single military project, ever.
Before taking office, president Donald Trump tweeted his disdain for the spiralling costs of the fleet and threatened to commission competitor Boeing instead (Lockheed Martin is the main maunfacturer, with BAE Systems and others contributing). He has since falsely taken credit for the lowered costs of the F-35 programme - the Pentagon had already announced a saving of $600 million. Delays in production, and problems with the jet's 'brains', the Autonomic Logistics Information System (Alis) software, have also led to cost increases.
But the decision to buy the F-35B was tied in with the UK’s long history of wanting, as Wilson calls it, “the biggest bang for their buck”.
There are inherent risks with the SRVL landing, which is only possible because of the size of the flight deck on HMS Queen Elizabeth. Risks like, the jet falling off the deck when it comes in to land.
“You might have a slippery deck, or you’re too close to the front, or the engine doesn’t go idle at the right time - there are several things that can happen and you’re just going to drop off the front and lose the airplane. So this is why it’s super important to do this level of engineering to make sure we are safe in every respect that we can possibly understand before we go out and execute it.” All of these aspects of the landing, are trialled in the simulator. Everything from the weather conditions, traction on the deck and the weight of the aircraft can be manipulated. Read more: Prepare for vertical landing with the next-gen F-35B jet
The F-35 simulator works in conjunction with a second 360-degree simulator located in the same facility, which mirrors the flight from air traffic control’s point of view on the carrier. As a direct result of sims like these working together, facets of the HMS Queen Elizabeth have already been modified ahead of its 2018 unveiling. The ski ramp was altered to account for the weight change, for example (F-35s weigh 60,000 pounds to a Harrier’s 30,000 pounds), and lights on the deck have been modified to make landing safer.
“If you have a carrier that’s moving up and down on the water, and you’re trying to land on it; if you’re coming down a fixed glide path and not trying to go up and down with it which is awkward, it’s unpredictable where you’re going to touch down,” explains Wilson. “If the carrier is low you might land very long, remember we talked about the possibility of running off the end?” The new lighting system flashes on and off, up and down the deck in such a way that the pilot always has a fixed point to aim for, no matter the movement of the ship or the weather.
“It’s the reason why we bothered with this,” Wilson says, indicating to the simulator. “If it’s done properly, you learn so much.”
The UK has not had a carrier of the magnitude of HMS Queen Elizabeth since the HMS Illustrious was decommissioned in 2014. Since then, a helicopter carrier has taken over and jet pilots have been on an exchange programme to the US to keep their skills up. When HMS Queen Elizabeth is finally unveiled it will be the largest operational carrier the Royal Navy has ever had, with another controversial price tag to match - the carrier, and its twin HMS Prince of Wales, cost £6.2 billion together. But the design and size of the carrier will also allow for another generation of fighters: unmanned aerial vehicles. Beyond the ski ramp for F-35s, there is an angled deck that will enable UAVs to takeoff in the future. The carriers could fit between 30 and 40 F-35s ondeck and below, but it could potentially host hundreds of UAVs one day. Wilson, who has spent the past 33 years flying jets, is not troubled by the prospect. With the right human oversight and controls, he welcomes it.
“I'm not worried about being out of a job anytime soon - I think UAVs have a very important part to play. I hope most UAVs are going to be too small for a pilot to get in because that’s the beauty of these little whizzy things - they can go and do a job and fly around for hours before being thrown away.
“They can put themselves in harm's way when we wouldn't want to put a human pilot there. It’s making warfare more tolerable for the community, for the population, because we don’t lose people. Which is a super important point.”
Wilson is the personable face of warfare because he is not, despite the entire content of our dialogue on the details of weaponry and battle, a “warmonger”, in his words. It does not seem lost on him that a UAV can keep war at arm’s reach of the nation states with the funds to afford them, and their populace. But he's ok with that. Ultimately he believes the object of building F-35s, mammoth carriers and hundreds of automated killing machines, is so you never have to use them. Or when you do, they are sophisticated enough that when deployed it is with a precision detail that makes collateral damage a defunct terminology.
Wilson has been a career pilot for more than three decades, for country and corporation - he says: “I love doing my job, it’s a fabulous job and I’m in a position of huge trust and feel very honoured.” He is also a husband and father, and speaks with as much animation - if not more - about his teenage son’s skills with the guitar and in computing, as he does the experience of soaring alongside a Royal Navy carrier piloting one of the most prestigious and expensive bits of military kit on the planet. He is a person in the business, as he sees it, of protecting people.
“That is my sole reason for doing this and I hate the thought we would ever have to deploy this to actually go out and kill people. But if someone is coming at us I’d far rather take out a few individuals if we could do that clinically and precisely without having any collateral damage at all. I'm ok to go that far. I'm not ok with the way it used to be in the early days of just ridiculous carpet bombing - that’s got to stop.”
The F-35 simulator, and future iterations, are designed to help the Royal Navy and others get to that position of precision. It’s about mitigating the risks to the pilot and everyone on board a carrier. But also hopefully limiting the likelihood of the chaos usually associated with warfare.
“Until you’ve done it, you don’t know quite how it’s going to go,” Wilson admits when discussing a specific manoeuvre (returning with an uneven load on the F-35). “So we have very good modelling, we go to the simulator, we train and we practice and we talk about it a lot in our meetings. We plan the test in intricate detail; we reduce the risk as much as we can but ultimately, when you go and do it for the first time, you've just got to suck it and see. There is some inherent risk in that, but we have become very good over the years at reducing that risk down to the minimum.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
