Mission  Support Tool

Requirements Summary

The Mission Support Tool (MST), while not contractually required, was an essential part of the PA operational concept. When the PA is operationally deployed, the MST provides the ability for a pilot to specify how the associate should support him/her during a mission.  The concept was that the MST would be part of the existing ground station that provides mission related information to the pilot.  The role of that ground station is to load a Data Transfer Unit (DTU) with mission data for the pilot to carry to the aircraft and initialize the on-board systems.  The MST would add to the DTU the pilot's personal preferences with respect to how the PA is supposed to behave, what authority the PA has to implement actions, and how the displays should be configured under specific circumstances.

While this seems to be a large amount of extra information, we expected this information to be incrementally adjusted during simulator training that precedes actual combat, so that before or after each mission, the pilot may adjust one or two parameters in the profile and save it for use on the next mission.   In detail, the MST was responsible for:

• provide access to all of the controllable actions and functions of the PA to set action authority limits as the pilot desires,
• coordinate cooperative sensor, weapon, maneuver and tactical plans with flight members, and
• minimize pre-mission stress by providing ready, intuitive access to those parts of the mission briefing the pilot might wish to review or update.

Phase 1 Implementation

The MST was implemented in Phase 1 in Lisp on a Symbolics 3640 workstation.

Phase 2 Implementation

In Phase 2, the MST was recoded in C++ and hosted on a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation.  In order to maintain compatibility between off-board and on-board route plans, the MST included a software emulation of the HSDGO used by the on-board Mission Planning subsystem. 

last updated 10/5/2002 by David Smith