One of last year’s quick-kill innovation projects, the Portable Manned Interactive Cockpit, was deployed from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., to Orlando, Fla., to participate in the Operation Blended Warrior event in December.

This was the second year of a four-year event and Edwards AFB’s Mark Louton (software developer and flyer), Steve Hansen (technician), Orion Westfall (lead developer), and Marilyn Lang (program management) all participated in the event.

OBW is a multi-year journey to explore the potential for Live, Virtual and Constructive capabilities to revolutionize training, education, and testing for the defense and security sectors. The overarching objectives of OBW include documenting lessons-learned and facilitating identification of hindrances to achieving a true interoperable, plug-and-play environment associated with distributed training.

A mix of 52 entities — industry, government and military — interactively operated in a common visual environment. PMIC operated as a Blue F-16 with air-to-air weapons capability. PMIC flew 30-minute operations each day over four days.

The PMIC team invested nine months of preparation to integrate 3-D visual models, which included missiles, aircraft ground threats, ships, visual databases and common digital terrain elevation data for fly-shoot-kill operations. A tactical radio application used as a primary battlespace communication meth-od proved to be an interesting challenge for the integration team.

According to Jerry Lockwood, Modeling and Simulation Flight chief, the integration of PMIC was very successful. “Using the PMIC, the team met objectives to find and secure an A-10 and achieve a radar lock on an enemy Mig 27. The lessons learned will be expanded into ground operations and integration of common digital terrain elevation data.”