This year's Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium in
Orlando was understandably downbeat. Fewer US Air Force officials and their
industry counterparts showed up due to the current fiscal climate. But some
contractors did show off their hardware. Their efforts paid-off, because while
fewer service officials attended, many top USAF officers did make the journey
to Florida. 
Beechcraft was one contractor that did make an effort to
show-off their wares. Together with partner CAE, the company showed-off a sim
for its AT-6 Texan II turbo-prop trainer/light attack plane. Beechcraft hopes
to sell the Afghan air force 20 of the machines under the Light Air Support
tender, which is being administered by the USAF. The service was originally
going to announce the winner of the contract today, but that's now been pushed
off until the February 27. Beechcraft's AT-6 is facing off against Sierra
Nevada/Embraer's A-29 Super Tucano.
This sim, according to CAE's engineers, replicates the cockpit of the AT-6 almost perfectly. Most of the components are direct copies of the real aircraft's systems except that they are not flight rated. The computer flight model is close, but not quite correct, the engineers told me--there is a bit of Dutch roll and adverse yaw that's not present in the real thing. It's actually quite noticeable when "flying" the sim as I saw when I flew it. In the video below, one CAE's engineers was kind enough to fly a quick demo for the DEW Line.
Staying on the topic of sims, BAE Systems also showed-off some
of the high fidelity graphics capabilities they expect will be part of their
T-X jet trainer pitch. That's of course assuming the USAF can afford to pay for
the T-X in this brutal fiscal environment. We'll see.
Moving onto engines, Pratt & Whitney had their top
executives present. I sat down with Bennett Croswell to talk about his
company's efforts to develop a new variable cycle engine for the Air Force
Research Laboratory's Adaptive Engine Technology Development (AETD) program.
More on that Monday probably.
General Electric brought this model of the F110, however, I
never did manage to track down any of their execs. But they are also working on
an AETD variable cycle engine.
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