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March 15, 2019 | Local, Aerospace

Preparing to ditch — a new way of training for helicopter emergencies

Jane Adey · CBC News

Imagine you're an offshore worker on a helicopter flying to an oil platform and you hear the words "prepare to ditch" from your pilot.

Adrenalin surges through your body as you raise your arms across your chest and assume the brace position. But will you remember what to do? Will panic take over?

A St. John's company is working with the Marine Institute to help offshore workers become more comfortable in the air and better prepared for emergencies.

Brainstorming a solution

Ten years ago, in the days after the crash of Cougar 491, Anthony Patterson began thinking about how to improve safety in the offshore.

His company, Virtual Marine, was in the early days of developing simulators for lifeboat training in the water.

But Patterson, whose team specialized in marine simulations, knew his company had some technologies that could apply to the air.

"We brainstormed on how we could create a better training experience," said Patterson, and they developed a small helicopter simulator.

"We're very good at modeling boats in the water and then even the helicopter floating in the water, but the part about the helicopter flying through the air, of course, we had no expertise with that whatsoever," said Patterson.

That's when Cougar Helicopters got on board.

Virtual Marine brought its helicopter simulator to the lead pilots at the company. With the simulator, they flew the different kinds of manoeuvres they'd use if they had to ditch at sea.

The simulator collected the data. and Virtual Marine embedded it into their simulation system to create the flight paths in an emergency.

The simulator consists of a large box made to look like exactly like the inside of a helicopter. A motion bed, attached to the underside and controlled by a computer, allows workers to feel the same kind of movement as they would during a flight.

The seatbelts are the same, the windows are the same and the views out the windows are the same as they would be in real life.

It's important that the simulator be as realistic as possible for Liz Sanli, a researcher in ocean safety at the Marine Institute with expertise in skill learning over time.

She's focused on how workers learn and how much they retain when asked to perform a task again at a later date.

"So we're looking at how we can train during practice to help them remember all those steps when they're in a stressful situation down the road," said Sanli.

Right now, workers are trained in a swimming pool on how to escape a helicopter submerged in water but training for the actual flight occurs in a classroom. By sitting inside a helicopter flight simulator, Sanli says, the workers' experience is more accurate.

"You're getting that experience of physically doing the task so you get to go through the steps you get to experience them you can sometimes experience mistakes in a safe environment and learn from those mistakes rather than just watching somebody else do it, for example," said Sanli.

"You also can simulate some of the feelings, so you can hear the sounds, you know that you're in a different environment and that can better match some of the more advanced training or perhaps even a real emergency."

Sanli measures anxiety levels of participants and follows how well the protocol sequence is followed under a variety of conditions.

She monitors what happens when trainees are seated in different positions and when they train in light and in darkness, getting as much information as possible to make training efficient and effective.

"It's a big responsibility to have this evidence to make decisions when it comes to regulations, when it comes to decisions about training to have it based in evidence. It's safety that's at stake," said Sanli.

For now, research on the simulator continues with hopes it will soon augment the training done by offshore workers. Patterson,says ten years after 17 lives were lost in the offshore, he's glad to have contributed what he could to try and make the industry safer.

"This really was something that was more than a job," he said. "It was something that we had to do, to do our part to bring safety to the community. Everybody in the company, we all worked extra hours. I'd say this is the one that all of our engineers have the most pride in, accomplishing this task."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/helicopter-cougar-crash-safety-offshore-1.5048792

On the same subject

  • CANADA'S LARGEST GLOBAL DEFENCE & SECURITY TRADE SHOW

    March 23, 2022 | Local, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

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  • Hacker Community to Take on DARPA Hardware Defenses at DEF CON 2019

    August 5, 2019 | Local, Security

    Hacker Community to Take on DARPA Hardware Defenses at DEF CON 2019

    This month, DARPA will bring a demonstration version of a secure voting ballot box equipped with hardware defenses in development on the System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program to the DEF CON 2019 Voting Machine Hacking Village (Voting Village). The SSITH program is developing methodologies and design tools that enable the use of hardware advances to protect systems against software exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities. To evaluate progress on the program, DARPA is incorporating the secure processors researchers are developing into a secure voting ballot box and turning the system loose for public assessment by thousands of hackers and DEF CON community members. Many of today's hardware defenses cover very specific instances or vulnerabilities, leaving much open to attack or compromise. Instead of tackling individual instances, SSITH researchers are building defenses that address classes of vulnerabilities. In particular, SSITH is tackling seven vulnerabilities classes identified by the NIST Common Weakness Enumeration Specification (CWE), which span exploitation of permissions and privilege in the system architectures, memory errors, information leakage, and code injection. “There are a whole set of cyber vulnerabilities that happen in electronic systems that are at their core due to hardware vulnerabilities – or vulnerabilities that hardware could block,” said Dr. Linton Salmon, the program manager leading SSITH. “Current efforts to provide electronic security largely rely on robust software development and integration, utilizing an endless cycle of developing and deploying patches to the software firewall without addressing the underlying hardware vulnerability. 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While protecting democracy is a critical national defense issue, SSITH is not trying to solve all issues with election system security nor is it working to provide a specific solution to use during elections. “We expect the voting booth demonstrator to provide tools, concepts, and ideas that the election enterprise can use to increase security, however, our true aim is to improve security for all electronic systems. This includes election equipment, but also defense systems, commercial devices, and beyond,” said Salmon. During DEF CON 2019, the SSITH voting system demonstrator will consist of a set of RISC-V processors that the research teams will modify to include their SSITH security features. These processors will be mounted on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and incorporated into a secure ballot box. Hackers will have access to the system via an Ethernet port as well as a USB port, through which they can load software or other attacks to challenge the SSITH hardware. Since SSITH's research is still in the early stages, only two prototype versions of the 15 processors in development will be available for evaluation. “At this year's Voting Village, hackers may find issues with the processors and quite frankly we would consider that a success. We want to be transparent about the technologies we are creating and find any problems in these venues before the technology is placed in another venue where a compromise could be more dangerous,” said Salmon. Following DEF CON 2019, the voting system evaluation effort will go on a university roadshow where additional cybersecurity experts will have an opportunity to further analyze and hack the technology. In 2020, DARPA plans to return to DEF CON with an entire voting system, which will incorporate fixes to the issues discovered during the previous year's evaluation efforts. The 2020 demonstrator will use the STAR-Vote system architecture, which is a documented, open source architecture that includes a system of microprocessors for the voting booth, ballot box, and other components. It also includes a verifiable paper ballot, providing both digital and physical representations of the votes cast within the booth. “While the 2020 demonstrator will provide a better representation of the full attack surface, the exercise will not result in a deployable voting system. To aid in the advancement of secure election equipment as well as electronic systems more broadly, the hardware design approaches and techniques developed during the SSITH program will be made available to the community as open-source items,” concluded Salmon. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-08-01

  • The Future Canadian Surface Combatant

    November 5, 2020 | Local, Naval

    The Future Canadian Surface Combatant

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Finally, it is an innovative approach that has only recently become both practical and advantageous because of recent technological developments, such as convergence and digitization. The General Purpose Warship Moment Naval force planning decisions must coexist in harmony with decisions regarding a navy's overall fleet mix of capital ships, “high-end” surface combatants, “low-end” combatants, and submarines—and the roles of each type.1 In particular, surface combatants have historically fulfilled one or two warfare roles, such as antiair and antisubmarine warfare. Until recently, fielding an affordable “general purpose warship” was too difficult to achieve. The technological limitations of the latter half of the 20th century and into the first decade of the 21st imposed inescapable constraints stemming from the necessary physical size and power requirements of electronics and equipment, along with the expensive and challenging integration of the various single-purpose weapons, sensors, communications, and command-and-control arrangements (as well as the operations and maintenance personnel) required for each role. These limitations could only be surmounted by increasing space, weight, crew size, and the commensurate complexity. As a result, many navies introduced multiple classes of surface combatants to handle the different warfare roles, as well as low-end ships (at less cost) to have sufficient numbers of ships available to respond to contingencies. For the RCN, with a small force of submarines and no capital ships, the approach until now followed this pattern, with the Iroquois-class destroyers focused until their divestment on task group command and area air defense and the more numerous Halifax-class frigates acting as more general-purpose/antisubmarine warfare platforms. Canada's allies have had to confront similar considerations. For example, in the United Kingdom, the number of hulls and capabilities of the Type 26 (the CSC's parent design, known as the Global Combat Ship) are directly connected to the planned acquisition of less-capable Type 31 frigates, the existence of Type 45 antiair-warfare destroyers, a larger submarine fleet, and the importance of capital ships, such as Royal Navy aircraft carriers. For Australia (which is also acquiring the Type 26/GCS-derived Hunter-class), the requirement to protect amphibious ships, more submarines in the fleet, and a separate class of air-warfare destroyers are key factors. Different requirements ultimately lead to different priorities and trade-off decisions, and Canada's circumstances are unlike any others. Canada's Geography, Fleet Size, and Operational Requirements Aside from the overall fleet mix, the other considerations for any state's naval force structure are the geographic factors, overall fleet size, and operational requirements. In Canada's case, unique geography includes the bicoastal nature of the RCN's homeports in Victoria, British Columbia, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the tricoastal areas of responsibility in the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic. Each area is very distant from the others, and therefore any timely maritime response generally must come from the closest base. In other words, when you need a ship from the opposite coast for any unexpected reason, it is a long way to go. So, it is best if all ships are equally capable and allocated more or less evenly among homeports. Similarly, the RCN must consider the long-range nature of its ship deployments—even domestic ones—because of the significant distances to anticipated theaters of operation. A single combatant class that can perform a wide range of tasks while remaining deployed best meets this challenge and provides more options to government when far away from homeport. For example, a CSC operating in the Asia-Pacific region as an air-defense platform for an allied amphibious task group can quickly respond to a requirement to hunt an adversary's submarine, if needed. Similarly, assembling a national naval task group of several multirole CSCs in response to a crisis is much more achievable when the RCN can draw from the whole surface combatant fleet to assign ships at the necessary readiness levels. The alternative may not guarantee a sufficient number of specialized variants needed for the task when the call comes. In other words, if any one ship becomes unavailable to perform a task for any reason, there is more depth available in the fleet to fill the gap and complete the mission. Consequently, having more ships of similar capabilities ensures a higher rate of operational availability, which is especially important with the RCN's relatively modest fleet size. For small fleets, a “high/low” mix of warships or multiple classes of more specialized combatants actually constrains operational availability. Cost-Saving Value While increasing complexity would ordinarily imply increasing cost, a single class of ships can actually present opportunities to increase cost efficiency. First, a single class of ships eliminates duplication of fixed program costs such as design and engineering and, during ship construction, further eliminates additional costs derived from retooling and pausing work in the shipyard between the construction of different classes, while achieving better learning curves and lowering overall costs per unit compared with two shorter construction runs. As each ship enters service, a single ship class in sufficient numbers has dedicated supply chains and more efficiency and equipment availability from the provision of common parts (especially given that two allies are procuring additional ships based on the common Type 26/GCS design.) Higher cost efficiencies in maintenance from labor specialization also can be expected, as well as the ability for more efficient repair training and use of required ship repair facilities and equipment. Furthermore, training costs associated with a single class are reduced through the ability to deliver common training modules to a larger student cohort, while simultaneously allowing for deeper knowledge and specialist personnel development among a larger pool of available crew with common qualifications. This latter point cannot be overstated—crew availability is a key requirement for operational availability, and the efficiencies made possible with a single set of common qualifications and training enables a larger pool of available personnel to deploy and more flexibility for sustained operations at the unit level. It includes Royal Canadian Air Force maritime helicopter crews and embarked unmanned systems specialists, as well as Army, special operations forces, and even Royal Canadian Mounted Police personnel in a law enforcement mission who would require no additional conversion training between classes once familiar with the CSC's modular mission bay arrangement or boat launching procedures. An Opportunity Enabled by Modern Technology Compared with a few decades ago, several recent technological developments are making multirole ships much more practical. Information-age innovation is, in essence, enabling all the potential advantages a single class of surface combatants while minimizing the traditional disadvantages. For example, any operations room or bridge display can now easily show video or data feeds from any sensor, weapon, or software support system—convergence. Likewise, instead of several stand-alone unmanned systems controllers, consoles that can control any of the ship's unmanned air, surface, or subsurface system are becoming available. Widespread digitization has reduced space requirements, while increasing system capability, flexibility, and power and cooling efficiency. This miniaturization allows for smaller components that can fit into smaller spaces. Multifunctionality can now be found in all kinds of components. For example, a single digital beam-forming radar can replace multiple traditional radars, software-defined radios can support different communications requirements on the fly, programmable multipurpose weapons can engage more than one kind of target but be fired from a common vertical launcher, and decoy launchers can now deploy a variety of defensive munitions. Multifunctionality even extends beyond individual systems to encompass features like the CSC's modular mission bay—a reconfigurable space able to accommodate and integrate any containerized payload imaginable. With an air-transportable, container-based set of payloads, embarking additional specialized equipment or capabilities into a deployed ship during an overseas port visit can be done in just a few days. These developments enable a single ship to rapidly transition to and execute many naval roles while defending itself against a myriad of threats. Although a ship's overall capacity (e.g., the desired number of crew accommodated, missiles embarked, unmanned systems carried, endurance and seakeeping performance, etc.) will still be constrained by its size, a single ship class can have a full range of capabilities. The CSC balances multirole capabilities with a modest amount of capacity. For example, it has one main gun and 32 vertical-launch cells, one helicopter, one mission bay, one multifunction radar, and the ability to embark approximately 204 personnel for crew and mission personnel. Further technological development and additional advantages will accrue from operating a single ship class, such as those from software development and data analytics. For example, the analysis of detailed technical data, such as system-error codes, from across the entire class in near-real time enables the efficient updating of control software to improve cyber security. Or, consider the ability to perform virtual research and development work on a digital twin of a physical system, such as a gas turbine, to examine performance limitations without risking the equipment itself. Data analytics performed on the same system when a part fails can help determine which sensors are critical and what patterns are early indicators of impending failure. This will allow the crew to perform preventive maintenance before the system fails catastrophically and should prevent failures in the other ships of the class. In a connected world, it is even possible to rapidly and remotely inject operational capability enhancements to deployed ships. Ultimately, the relative ease with which the software elements of a combat system can be changed will allow ships of the same class a greater capability to act and react with agility, the most efficient way to maximize potential for a relatively small fleet. Acknowledging the unique Canadian geographical and operational requirements, the imposed limitations on naval force structure, and the need to maximize the RCN's effectiveness while seeking cost efficiencies calls for a single class of surface combatant—the current CSC project. Canada will benefit from this innovative solution for decades. The RCN is well-positioned to make the most of this new platform and the inherent flexibility and multirole capabilities it will bring. The Canadian government's decision to move forward with the CSC program as a single surface combatant class is not only eminently feasible, but also the most sensible for the situation we face. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/november/future-canadian-surface-combatant

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