ATHENS, Ga. -- Tensions lessened in the Persian Gulf recently as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan brokered an inspection deal with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But the rising U.S. military presence in the region will continue until inspections begin once again for possibly hidden weapons of mass destruction.
One key to success for U.N. forces, both in the Gulf War and the current standoff, is the E-3 Sentry or AWACS aircraft, a modified Boeing 707 with a rotating radar dome that permits surveillance from the Earth's surface into the stratosphere, over land or water. The AWACS was used around the clock in Operation Desert Storm, and pilots flew more than 400 missions and provided surveillance to more than 120,000 coalition sorties.
That's the good news. The down side is that training crews for the AWACS is expensive and time-consuming, and pilots on long shifts can suffer from serious fatigue. That's why the U.S. Air Force is making a multi-million-dollar grant to a program headed by a psychologist at the University of Georgia -- to develop an Internet-based training system that can help AWACS crews make better decisions.
"The Air Force is interested in developing a new way of training AWACS crews based not on multi-million-dollar simulators but by bringing people together using desk-top computers," said Dr. Robert Mahan, an applied cognitive psychologist at UGA. "So, we're building that new simulator from the ground up."
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research just granted $510,000 for Phase I of the new program and will give between $500,000 and $800,000 for Phase II. Under a separate initiative called Small Business Innovative Research Grants, the Air Force is also making other large grants to companies who will help develop software for the AWACS simulator.
The radar platforms and surveillance instruments on an AWACS are operated by four-person flight crews, often in 12- to 16-hour shifts that can be extremely stressful, especially in combat. (Flights also carry from 13-19 specialists, depending on the mission.) Team decision-making can be crucial to tracking enemy aircraft and ships, as well as knowing the status of friendly aircraft and naval vessels. AWACS teams also provide battlefield information that can change the course of a ground engagement.
Crews are well-trained now, especially in high-tech mock-up simulators at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. But it's expensive to fly crews to a single site and train them, and maintenance of the simulators is costly. Keeping crews alert during missions is also a problem, currently solved by medications that chase away drowsiness and inattentiveness.
Engineering, testing and evaluation on AWACS planes first began in October 1975, and the first planes were assigned to at the 552nd Air Control Wing at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma in 1977. In addition, four of the planes are assigned to Pacific Air Forces, and NATO has acquired 18 of them. The planes are also used by the United Kingdom and France. The U.S. now has some 33 AWACS aircraft -- which cost about $270 million each -- in active service.
"The actual operations in an AWACS " the button-pushing " can be learned rather quickly," said Mahan."What we want to find are ways to deal with complex decision tasks, particularly at the command and control level. An essential element is coordination of decision behavior."
The large computer configuration, from which AWACS crews will access varied task simulations, will be located in the Advanced Human Resource Project lab in the UGA Psychology Building. The project itself, call SynTEAM, for synthetic team effectiveness assessment and modeling, will bring crews-in-training together from different locations to work on the common team problems.
The simulator will help crews work on tasks and problems and will also help determine when their levels of concentration begin to fail over long flight durations. Eventually, those working on simulators will be wired with sensors that measure a range of psychophysiological processes in an effort to understand the effects of fatigue on team decision-making. Mahan said the information gathered during initial testing with crews could lead to a redesign of on-board systems to make them more user-friendly and effective.
"For instance, when the crews are very alert, they might find using tables of numbers the best way to get information for making decisions," he said. "But as the computer senses they are getting tired, that their reaction time may be eroding, it could automatically switch to graphic and picture displays, which could make understanding data easier."
Although the software and overall programs are being designed for initial use by the Air Force, the technology could also be used later by private corporations in training decision-making work groups.
An initial version of the new Internet AWACS simulator should be ready for testing by the end of 1998, said Mahan.
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