Evaluating the effectiveness of flight simulators for training combat skills: A review

The military is focusing a great deal of effort on developing virtual world technologies that will allow training combat skills in flight simulators. Considerably less attention is being directed toward documenting the effectiveness of such training. In this article, we review Air Force and Navy efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of training the combat skills necessary for attack and fighter aircraft in flight simulators. The majority of these efforts indicate that simulation can be a valuable complement to the aircraft. Unfortunately, this conclusion is based primarily on opinion data from experienced aviators. There are very few transfer of training experiments, and those experiments have examined only a limited set of combat tasks. We also describe the typical paradigms used to conduct training evaluations and outline a multistep evaluation program for determining training effectiveness.