Breaking boundaries: How Red 6 is transforming pilot training

Leading things off today, though, we're going to talk about an effort to address two of the Air Force's biggest obstacles when it comes to training and retaining their pilots

Those obstacles are resource constraints and just not enough available aircraft to meet minimal training requirements

But you know we are solutions-oriented journalists here on the show, so enter Red 6, and some potentially game-changing innovations for military aviators

That's why they're the subject of this week's debrief. What was once viewed as a short-term problem is now a generational one

The Air Force's pilot force is too small, and it's poorly structured to be the force required to prevail in peer conflict

The Air Force has suffered a persistent pilot shortage for decades. If we don't have experienced fighter pilots, we risk the outcome not just of the mission, but the entire operation or even the war

You don't have to listen to the Air Force here to believe or to be led to believe that we need to be bigger

Listen to the joint force. Listen to the demands of the combatant commanders that are asking for air power

According to Heather Penny, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies

the Air Force has been roughly 2,000 pilots short of its goals for more than a decade

On top of that, they're dealing with outdated training aircraft, potential cuts to their force structure, and expected squadron closures

Add it all up, and it's easy to see why the service is finding it hard to make sure

its current pilots are getting the training experience they need to perform well in combat

I commend the Air Force for all the efforts they're making. But this is a long-term problem that we're not going to see the outcomes of for five to maybe even 10 years

While there is no one cure-all, there is a Florida-based company working to provide an answer to part of the problem right now

We honor our history But we are the future Red Six laid in America for America

Founded by Daniel Robinson in 2018, Red Six is on a mission to reimagine military flight

training by using cutting-edge augmented reality and mixed reality. While serving in the British

Royal Air Force, Robinson, a former fighter pilot himself, conceived of the idea while

encountering problems similar to those of the U.S. Air Force. We needed to train against, you know

significant numbers every day of the week against relevant threats, and we were just failing to do

that. That experience led him to the idea of putting augmented reality into the cockpit of

actual aircraft rather than a simulator. So we asked ourselves, could we make simulation work

outdoors up in the sky? And that was the genesis of the idea for ATARS, the ability to create

virtual synthetic worlds, but up in the sky, such that pilots in real airplanes physically are

interacting with digital content and digital environments, but outdoors. And that was the

idea behind ATARS and RED-6. ATARS stands for Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System

the backbone of Red 6's fully immersive training environments that are driven by data and powered

by AI, so pilots can train safely and effectively in realistic threat situations, especially in

high-speed settings. Their goal is to combine the best of simulation with real-world experience

to better prepare American pilots. We had to have a means by which we enter these digital

the world's outdoors. So the enabling technology is augmented reality. And I will draw a distinction right up front

Augmented reality is not helmet mounted cueing. Helmet mounted cueing does not do augmented reality

It is a fundamentally different technology. We're not aiming to put a head of a display

in the field of view of the pilot. We aiming to mimic human vision and put three contextual information into the field of view of the pilot and have it behave in a manner commensurate with real objects flown by real pilots To do that Robinson says Red 6 had to create purpose technology to work in real

world environments. That meant creating something that would work in any weather condition on any

kind of helmet. We don't manufacture helmets. We manufacture an AR optical system that attaches to

any helmet that does everything that helmet-mounted systems do, but to orders of magnitude

great, a far higher standard. But it also now gives you a gateway into this digital world

if you like, a synthetic training world outdoors. Doing that meant Red 6 would have to create

something that tackled three specific problems. The ability to produce equipment quickly

then make it work on frontline jets, and then putting it all together to create the experience

of fighting peer threats. So the beauty of what we have is if we have, assume, an intelligence base

on the platforms, it's simply code. You put the codes in and they're much like any simulator you're

flying against, whatever it is you want to fly against. So we've created environments that are

scalable, able to train in frequently, and are absolutely relevant to the threats we'd face if

we were going to do it for real. For decades, the Air Force has used aerial combat exercises like

Red Flag at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to gather fighters, bombers, and refuelers

and simulate real-world combat situations for all kinds of air crews. But those kinds of exercises

demand a lot of man hours, logistics, and big budgets. It's something Red Six can offer at a

fraction of the cost. It gives you the ability to expand the training scenarios enormously

but you're still doing the job for real. So when you're in these representative threat environments

you're still under the cognitive loads you would be for real and making the decisions in those environments

One thing Red 6 offers pilots that they've never been able to fully replicate in training

is surface-to-air missile threats. Think Maverick Phoenix and Rooster trying to evade their unnamed adversary in Top Gun Maverick Here it comes Radar warning Smoke in the air Phoenix break right Emergency Jackson Dagger 3 defending Here comes another one Dagger 3 defending It the greatest risk to an airplane being shot down

Well now, we can be physically flying the airplanes and you can see a surface-to-air

missile launch. You can see the boost, the sustain phase. You see the smoke trail

You can see whether it's taking lead and lag. you get to fly the airplane against it, deploy countermeasures, physically try and defeat it

with endgame maneuvers. That level of realism and training will save lives, and we've never in our

history been able to do it. So that's the benefit of bringing simulation and connecting it to life

flight. There are multiple examples of that, but that one I think is perhaps one of the most

important things. Of course, the Air Force, as well as the Navy and Marine Corps, fly a lot of

aircraft that aren't fighter jets. Red Six knows this too, and built out simulations for a number

of training scenarios, like in-air refueling. The first time you ever go air to air refueling

as a pilot, whatever kind of pilot, is the first time you ever go, is the first time you go air to

air refueling. And it's scary by day, and it's terrifying at night. Well, now we can start to

utilize this technology to expose pilots to this level of training in multiple scenarios. So by the

time they go to these assets for the first time, it's so intuitive because they've seen the picture

multiple times and they've seen it as they're physically flying an airplane. So what does the

future hold for Red 6? Robinson tells us they're already working with a number of training platforms

and are making inroads beyond the Air Force within the DoD, as well as Britain's Ministry

of Defense as well. I really believe that ATARS doesn't just represent a brand new

really important technology, I think what we've actually done is create a new market

And I think this is going to change training to the point where it will never be the same again

Training has broken the world throughout the world for all allied nations. It's really in

dire straits. This is the solution to how we'll train in the future. We're really excited to be a

part of it