Flight Test Boss Details How China Threat Is Rapidly Changing Operations At Edwards AFB

"It is an incredible time to be involved in the world of U.S. Air Force flight-test. What we're doing right now is designed to innovate and accelerate our next generation of capability. We're modernizing so many of our weapon systems and many new technologies are all going through testing at the same time," enthused Brig. Gen. Douglas "Beaker" Wickert, commander of the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. "Secretary Kendall has been very clear that we are out of time, that our Air Force has never been older or smaller than it is right now, and that the People's Liberation Army has been specifically designed to defeat us."

"The investments we're making right now in modernization and testing for the USAF are designed for success and aimed at changing Chairman Xi's calculus about pushing back aggressively against the international rules based order. What we are doing here and across USAF flight-testing is extremely consequential."

The installation at the heart of American military flight-testing for more than 80 years, known today as Edwards AFB, is located in California's northwestern Mojave desert. This test center has witnessed pioneering advances in aviation since 1942, including a Golden Age in the 1950s that saw an exotic assortment of new military aircraft and X-planes under frantic development in the skies above this sprawling base .

Today, Edwards AFB is extremely busy as the resident 412th Test Wing supports multiple efforts to rapidly advance USAF capabilities. Just like on Oct. 14, 1947, when Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager became the first human to exceed the speed of sound, or when William J. "Pete" Knight flew the highly modified X-15A-2 on Oct. 3, 1967, to a top speed of Mach 6.72 (4,520 mph), going faster and higher than any other piloted winged vehicle other than the Space Shuttle, testing at Edwards stands at the bleeding edge of aviation innovation.

Flying operations at Edwards today are complex and diverse and they include ushering in a new era of advanced autonomous uncrewed capabilities that make full use of emerging revolutions in technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI), as well as shepherding new aircraft like the B-21 Raider and T-7A Red Hawk into service. The War Zone sat down with Wickert in his office at Edwards for a detailed discussion covering some of the most important subjects that are impacting USAF flight-testing at this crucial time.

USAF test empire Wickert began his USAF career as an F-16 pilot, and he has been involved in the military flight-test community for the past two decades, with many accolades including being a professor at the Air Force Academy. His role commanding the 412th Test Wing affords him an overarching, top down overview of all USAF testing. "From here, you are afforded a really good vantage point to assess the state of the test world," said Wickert.

The 412th Test Wing at Edwards and the 96th Test Wing at Eglin AFB , Florida, both sit under the umbrella of the Air Force Test Center, which is headed up by Maj. Gen. Scott Cain, and is also headquartered at Edwards. "The test community is relatively small, on both the development test side and the partnering operational test side ," Wickert explained.

"We really have to keep our finger on the pulse to understand, with the finite resources that we have, how we facilitate the greatest return on investment, on time, and on our people. As we look at the work we expect to be running here over the next three years, we think we need as many as 1,600 new personnel to work here in our testing ecosystem. In addition to all of that, we need the right type and number of mission control rooms, chase aircraft, and tanker aircraft. We must balance those needs to make sure that we're moving everything through smoothly, and so when a system under test is not quite ready, we can rapidly reallocate resources where necessary to achieve success."

While ensuring the correct physical assets are in place to meet demand, there's also a pressure to evolve flight testing, which is traditionally an extremely laborious process, but essential in procedure to meet safety and capability targets. "We are looking for opportunities to accelerate our testing," said Wickert. "Our test ecosystem consists of five key things. Firstly, there's our ground resources, things like wind tunnels and high-speed test tracks, the Joint Simulation Environment [JSE], which is essentially a digital test and training resource.We also have flight resources, things like one-of-a-kind aircraft that are constructed with built-in string gauges and accelerometers to make them highly instrumented aircraft, so you know exactly what the system under test is doing, to include the mission systems. Then we have our instrumental ranges that we are working to tie together. Here we have a western range alliance, that's the Pacific Test Ranges near Point Mugu, the Nevada Test and Training Range , and the R-2508 complex ."

"There's also the data. Particularly now as systems are getting more and more complex, we take terabytes of data off of every single test. Finally, there's the highly educated people that work here. We have the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards , we have almost 1,000 engineers, flight-test engineers, these are a national resource in our test engineering group. This is our test ecosystem and each of those elements are ripe for innovative and creative ways to accelerate our testing, and it's our responsibility to do that."

Evolving USAF testing USAF leadership is looking at an aggressive timeline with regard to the fielding of new platforms such as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) amid what the Pentagon calls calls Great Power Competition . Wickert and his team are charged with ensuring the flight-test ecosystem is geared up for efficient means to push such new technologies effectively and efficiently through the rigorous testing that's needed to field advanced new capabilities.

"Right now we're at a point as generation AI is coming along and it's a really exciting time. We're experimenting with ways to use new tools across the entire test process, from test planning to test execution, from test analysis to test reporting. With investments from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office [CDAO] we have approved under Control Unclassified Information [CUI] a large language model that resides in the cloud, on a government system, where we can input a test description for an item under test and it will provide us with a Test Hazard Analysis [THA]. It will initially provide 10 points, and we can request another 10, and another 10, etc, in the format that we already use. It's not a finished product, but it's about 90% there."

"When we do our initial test brainstorming, it's typically a very creative process, but that can take humans a long time to achieve. It's often about coming up with things that people hadn't considered. Now, instead of engineers spending hours working on this and creating the administrative forms, the AI program creates all of the points in the correct format, freeing up the engineers to do what humans are really good at – thinking critically about what it all means."

"So we have an AI tool for THA, and now we've expanded it to generate test cards from our test plans that we use in the cockpit and in the mission control rooms. It uses the same large language model but trained on the test card format. So we input the detailed test plan, which includes the method of the test, measures of effectiveness, and we can ask it to generate test cards. Rather than spending a week generating these cards, it takes about two minutes!"

Wickert says the Air Force Test Center is also blending its AI tooling into test reporting to enable rapid analysis and "quick look" reports. For example, audio recordings of debriefs are now able to be turned into written reports. "That's old school debriefs being coupled with the AI tooling to produce a report that includes everything that we talked about in the audio and it produces it in a format that we use," explained Wickert.

"There's also the AI that's under test, when the system under test is the AI, such as the X-62A VISTA [Variable-stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft]. VISTA is a sandbox for testing out different AI agents, in fact I just flew it and we did a BVR [Beyond Visual Range] simulated cruise missile intercept under the AI control, it was amazing. We were 20 miles away from the target and I simply pushed a button to engage the AI agent and then we continued hands off and it flew the entire intercept and saddled up behind the target. That's an example of AI under test and we use our normal test procedures, safety planning, and risk management all apply to that."

"There's also AI assistance to test. In our flight-test control rooms, if we're doing envelope expansion, flutter, or loads, or handling qualities – in fact we're about to start high angle-of-attack testing on the Boeing T-7 , for example – we have engineers sitting there watching and monitoring from the control room. The broad task in this case is to compare the actual handling against predictions from the models to determine if the model is accurate. We do this as incremental step ups in envelope expansion, and when the reality and the model start to diverge, that's when we hit pause because we don't understand the system itself or the model is wrong. An AI assistant in the control room could really help with real-time monitoring of tests and we are looking at this right now. It has a huge impact with respect to digital engineering and digital material management."

"I was the project test pilot on the Greek Peace Xenia F-16 program. One example of that work was that we had to test a configuration with 600-gallon wing tanks and conformal tanks, which equated to 22,000 pounds of gas on a 20,000-pound airplane, so a highly overloaded F-16. We were diving at 1.2 mach, and we spent four hours trying to hit a specific test point. We never actually managed to hit it. That's incredibly low test efficiency, but you're doing it in a very traditional way – here's a test point, go out and fly the test point, with very tight tolerances. Then you get the results and compare them to the model. Sometimes we do that real time, linked up with the control room, and it can typically take five or 10 minutes for each one. So, there's typically a long time between test points before the engineer can say that the predictions are still good, you're cleared to the next test point."

"AI in the control room can now do comparison work in real time, with predictive analysis and digital modeling. Instead of having a test card that says you need to fly at six Gs plus or minus 1/10th of a G, at 20,000 feet plus or minus 400 feet pressure altitude, at 0.8 mach plus or minus 0.05, now you can just fly a representative maneuver somewhere around 20,000 feet and make sure you get through 0.8 mach and just do some rollercoaster stuff and a turn. In real time in the control room you're projecting the continuous data that you're getting via the aircraft's telemetry onto a reduced order model, and that's the product."

"When Dr Will Roper started trumpeting digital engineering , he was very clear that in the old days we graduated from a model to test. In the new era of digital engineering, we graduate from tests to a validated model. That's with AI as an assistant, being smarter about how we do tests, with the whole purpose of being able to accelerate because the warfighter is urgently asking for the capability that we are developing."

Collaborative Combat Aircraft One of the clearest areas the USAF is looking to accelerate surrounds Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) , a new family of unmanned combat drones that are designed to work in concert with manned fighters and provide a force multiplying, highly autonomous, numerical edge in tactical aerial warfare. The USAF faces an incredibly complex and laborious task when it comes to testing, training with, and fielding CCAs.

"We need to break the problem down, then we need to integrate all the pieces back together, and it has multiple components," explained Wickert. "There's the physical challenge of actually getting a CCA to fly. Does it have sufficient thrust? Do we have the right control laws? That's going to largely be contractor led. Separately, in parallel, we are developing the autonomous agents that will actually be the brains that can take some higher order commands and execute those, at varying levels of autonomy."

Edwards is planned as the USAF's home of CCA flight-test, and work is commencing to build a new CCA enclave here. "Once it's mature and it's ready for integration, it'll come up here and it will fly from here. We have to actually connect it with a crewed fighter. Those tests have to happen in open air because there's so many uncertainties, we will need to prove that it actually works in a real world environment. Then there's weapon integration, that'll be a separate effort."

In terms of validating how the CCAs will be employed, much of this modeling will be undertaken in the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE). "Once we have good validated models of how the CCA will work, it's very easy to take those models and put them into the JSE. Every new program now has to be JSE-compatible and must be able to integrate into digital test. The JSE is not a simulator. There are simulators that plug into JSE, there's domes you can sit and fly, but the JSE is an architecture that's perfect for prototyping, developing, and working out how you are actually going to employ."

"The digital test range runs using the JSE. That's where we will figure out if a single F-22 pilot can control four CCAs, is that the right number, maybe it's two, maybe it depends on the scenario. I've got a task, you've got a threat over there, I need the CCA to create a diversion. All of that will be worked out first in the digital test and training range."

"I can easily imagine that F-22 and F-35 pilots will routinely train with CCAs, just like they routinely train with an AIM-120 or an AIM-9X missile without ever actually having the missile leave the aircraft. They will live fly and train with them synthetically around them in a live virtual constructive situation , so I can see how that would work with a tablet . The digital test and training range means we can look at all of these different scenarios, perhaps that's a 2035 scenario, this is the concept of developing the analysis of alternatives. We can experiment and work out if we were to get say 30 of these new platforms, would it change the game?"

High tempo operations While the synthetic JSE provides valuable modeling, prototyping and training, actually bringing together real aircraft in live fly test events is critical in proving that different capabilities actually work in the real world. Bringing together a wealth of different aircraft and new systems is a complex and costly affair, and therefore a quartet of large force test exercises has been developed.

"We run Orange Flag from Edwards , plus we have Emerald Flag at Eglin in Florida for the long-range kill and communications elements, we have the 53rd Wing's Black Flag at Nellis AFB, and also Gray Flag for the Navy , that's run out of Point Mugu. Some programs that are well funded allow us to bring together lots of different nodes and sensors to test the new capability. There are also less well funded projects that might want to join in and have the opportunity to work in a complex scenario like one of the flag exercises. So really it's a case of we are throwing a party and you're invited to come, bring all of your latest and greatest stuff and let's see what works. That includes Army land systems, Navy ships – the full range of advanced systems."

"We are busier here at Edwards now than we were in the 1980s. We're testing the USAF's newest airplane, the B-21 , and at the same time testing the B-52 and all of its new upgrades including new engines and new radar. The USAF's new trainer, the T-7 Redhawk, is also being tested here, and many other things in between. We call Edwards the center of the aerospace testing universe, but it's actually more than that, because it's more than just the USAF flight-test here."

"It's very easy to motivate folks because right now is a time of consequence. If you want to know what the USAF of 2027 or 2035 or 2042 looks like, just look in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base because the Air Force that's flying over Edwards is the Air Force that we're going to go to war with."

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