Above left to
right: The WPS
shares jets with
the 422nd TES,
with its jets seen
here under the
obligatory sun
shelters at Nellis
AFB. Jamie Hunter
Climbing in
for a mission
from Nellis.
The majority of
early missions
in the course
see student and
instructor going
head-to-head.
Jamie Hunter
Below: Nellis
AFB lies to the
north of Las
Vegas, Nevada,
and is arguably
the USAF’s most
important base.
Jamie HunterWeapons School in 2013, the importance
of resourcing the school and its
infrastructure at Nellis cannot be over
emphasised. The Weapons O cers act as
a readiness booster shot for the Air Force,
keeping it ready for that near-peer
adversary, that highly-contested
environment.
Like ‘Red Flag’ exercises, the scenarios at
the Weapons School are o the scale
— so challenging — which means that
when these top-of-the-Air-Force pilots
and mission experts face that future
threat, whatever it may be, they are more
than ready.
As the adversary becomes more
advanced, so do those presentations that
the Raptors need to ght against — it’s
always a challenge to bring a higher level
of adversary replication to the Weapons
School to allow pilots to train e ectively
against those threats.SIMULATORS AND
INTEGRATION
With the heavy lifting of the pure live
ying air-to-air of the course complete
the students head o to Marietta,
Georgia, for a week in the Lockheed
Martin F-22 simulators. ‘There are pros
and cons to the simulator,’ explains Lt Col
Huebinger. ‘They can replicate things we
just can’t do in live ying in training, such
as actual missiles ying around or
environments outside of Nevada. The
other bene t is that we can run multiple
attempts at a particular mission, so we
get a lot of repetition and the students all
get to cycle through that. There’s
students in the simulator cockpit all day.
‘It doesn’t make sense to do visual
ying in the simulator because you need
to rely on the real world visual cues. We
typically y a lot of BVR [beyond visual
range] scenarios in the simulator, youget into ACM and beyond we ght
against dissimilar adversaries and that
could run the entire gamut of the Nellis
air adversary enterprise. That’s often the
64th [Aggressor Squadron], visiting
ghter units plus we are now starting to
incorporate some of the contractor
adversaries as well.
‘The F-22 being a premier air-to-air
platform, we are one of the consumers
that require the greatest number of
adversary aircraft. The current situation is
that it’s di cult to schedule the numbers
of adversary aircraft that we’d like at
times, so that’s where the Air Force is
continuing to work on di erent sources
of adversaries, including the contractors.’
Nellis units are no strangers to the
e ects of a constrained budget
environment. With the disbandment of
the 65th Aggressor Squadron and the
cancellation of an entire course at the7772-81 Weapons School C.indd 77 28/09/2017 15:01