At the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Lt. Gen. Dennis Luyt told the audience, "This new platform offers a lot of possibilities but, on the training side, a lot of requirements to be able to really present it with a training environment where you can fully train on the missions."
He added, "That’s really quite a challenge because it’s about being able to employ live weapons, which I think should be part of the training for F-35, and probably the bigger piece of that is you need to be able to do threat simulation and create an environment with threats that you can work into a scenario which really makes you trained as you fight," according to DODBuzz.
Lt. Luyt sat on a panel with Maj. Gen. Max Nielsen, chief of staff of Denmark’s defense command and Gen. Tod Wolters, who commands the US Air Forces in Europe.
"To be totally honest, we do have a challenge there in Europe because our military use of airspace is being more and more [congested] by our civilian counterparts who want to go to a single European sky, and there’s a lot of competition for the same piece of airspace," the commander explained.
US Air Force pilots began virtual training on the F-35 in 2015.
"The F-35 is going to be an incredible advancement in our capability as an Air Force, and the Full Mission Simulators present an environment to adequately challenge our pilots as they prepare for combat," the 34th Fighter Squadron Commander, Lt. Col. George Watkins, told Lockheed Martin at the time.
"Looking at my own air force and the way I think that we will be employing this new weapon system, I think we will need to use virtual means of training a lot more than we have until now with the F-16, and I know for the average fighter pilot, and I think both of my neighbors will probably acknowledge this, this is usually not the most fun thing to do — stepping into a simulator to fly a mission," Luyt said.
Three variations of the F-35 will replace legacy fighters in 11 countries. The stealthy fifth-generation fighter is equipped with advanced networked sensors.
