Total In-Flight Simulator 50th Anniversary

AFRL's Total In-Flight Simulator is celebrating 50 years of service.

AFRL's Total In-Flight Simulator (TIFS), a Convair C-131 Samaritan aircraft, entered service on March 22, 1955. The C-131 aircraft had performed various transport operations for approximately a decade up to that point, and the Air Force (AF) Flight Dynamics Laboratory--now AFRL-- subsequently chose it for a very special mission: developing next-generation air vehicles.

Figure 1. TIFS simulation cockpit configuration
Figure 2. TIFS ASTTA configuration

Performing extensive modification, AFRL transformed the airplane into TIFS,
a one-of-a-kind simulator that engineers can program to simulate virtually any type of air vehicle, in flight, with six degrees of freedom. When most other C-131s left the AF's active fleet in the late 1970s, TIFS was just beginning to support programs such as the space shuttle, B-1 and B-2 bombers, and numerous private sector tests and development efforts.

AFRL owns TIFS, and Calspan Corporation operates it through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. Mr. Norman Weingarten, Calspan's in-flight simulation operations manager, began his involvement with this airplane while working as a project engineer during the extensive modification effort that produced TIFS. "It's more realistic than a ground simulator, because you are flying an actual airplane in real-world motion with realworld visuals," Mr. Weingarten explains.

In fact, pilots moving from TIFS to an actual aircraft frequently remark that the aircraft handles exactly the way that TIFS simulated its handling. Further, because TIFS allows pilots to operate during simulated failures, it provides them the opportunity to study and react to dangerous situations in a safe vehicle that can instantly revert to normal control. Mr. Weingarten recognizes the advantage this provides: "Often, you don't want to fail a system on an [actual] airplane, even in a test mode, because it might be too dangerous to fly [as a result]. Our airplane can do that safely."

TIFS' many benefits extend to engineers as well. Normally, a test aircraft will accumulate several hundred hours of flight data, but "on the ground, all engineers [can] do is look at computer outputs, time histories, graphs, and displays. But actually being up there and experiencing all of the little oscillations and responses brings a sense of reality to the test. Flying helps engineers to appreciate the problems that they are investigating," Mr. Weingarten asserts.