Requirements, Design, and Development of a Rapidly Reconfigurable, Photo-Realistic, Virtual Cockpit Prototype

The United States Air Force uses aircraft flight simulators for pilot training and mission rehearsal. They use a variety of simulators for this task ranging with prices ranging from $400,000 to $30,000,000. These simulators have specialized hardware that restricts reuse of their components and increases maintenance costs. Air Education and Training Command wants to reduce simulators cost and improve availability to the operational commands by supporting research in virtual reality flight simulators. This thesis looks at the development of a reconfigurable virtual cockpit in a distributed virtual environment that can be used for different aircraft as well as training scenarios. The thesis effort builds on a F-15 virtual cockpit previously developed at AFIT by creating a F-16. The Rapidly Reconfigurable Virtual Cockpit (RRVC) allows users to switch between an F-15 and F-16 during live simulation. All software models and aircraft geometry files are updated to reflect the current aircraft. The ability of a distributed virtual environment to support two unique aircraft flight simulators in a single application is encouraging. With the development of more aircraft, a single application can be provided to the operational pilot community that would support many aircraft at a fraction of the cost of today\u27s flight simulators