By Phil Williams
Although tensions have lessened in the Persian Gulf recently, with the agreement brokered by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military presence in the region will continue until U.N. weapons inspections begin once again.
One key to success for U.N. forces, both during the Gulf War and in the current crisis, 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.
Internet-based training
That's the good news. The downside is that the training of 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 UGA--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 desktop computers," says Robert Mahan, an applied cognitive psychologist at UGA. "So, we're building that new simulator from the ground up."
Two-phase project
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has allotted $510,000 for the first phase of the new program and will give between $500,000 and $800,000 for the second phase. The Air Force is making other large grants to companies that will 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 to 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, using 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 Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma in 1977. The United States now has 33 AWACS aircraft--costing about $270 million each--in active service. In addition, NATO has acquired 18. The planes are also used by the United Kingdom and France.
Complex decision tasks
"The actual operations in an AWACS--the button pushing--can be learned rather quickly," says 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--called SynTEAM, for synthetic team effectiveness assessment and modeling--will bring crews-intraining 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 psycho-physiological processes in an effort to understand the effects of fatigue on team decision-making. Mahan says 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 says. "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 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, says Mahan.
