21-05-2025
Red 6 targets pilot training woes with airborne augmented reality
In a small hangar east of downtown Orlando sits a custom two-seater aircraft hardwired for combat. It carries no missiles under its wings. It has no concealed weapons bay. And it has no refueling probe.
It does, however, host the Advanced Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS), which can simulate all of the above.
The big picture: Training and rehearsal are cornerstones of military success. But it's easier said than done. Services like the U.S. Air Force are plagued by pilot shortages, aging aircraft and availability issues.
Historically, there has been an "inability to train against representative threats at scale and at frequency to keep ourselves ready," Daniel Robinson, the CEO of ATARS maker Red 6, told Axios during a visit last week.
"We were never, ever, ever going to fix this problem of training using physical assets and pilots and dollars, because we just don't have enough of them."
How it works: The ATARS headset projects virtual, interactive objects against the real world, offering users a custom training environment. It works in the air, while flying an actual plane, or on the ground strapped into a mock cockpit.
"It's basically a massively multiplayer video game being played outdoors to a very, very high standard," said Robinson, a former F-22 and Tornado pilot.
Surface-to-air missile sites perch on the horizon. Missiles zip past your head. Your digital wingman screeches off. Ships glide through the water below.
State of play: Red 6's tech is embedded in the T-38. The company, employing about 150 people, is also tinkering with the F-16 and MC-130. It has existing relationships with BAE Systems, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The intrigue: The sandbox can be quickly updated; it already includes collaborative combat aircraft. The Air Force's competition for them hasn't even concluded.
Robinson said he flew against a Chinese J-36 the morning of the media tour. (That aircraft emerged in December, causing quite the online stir.)
Our thought bubble: The virtual world can be incredibly useful for visualizing, engineering and testing bleeding-edge weapons and vehicles.
Digital twin chatter is more than hype.
Zoom out: The Pentagon has long sought accurate, agile simulation.
The Army established an entire program executive office dedicated to it and has pursued projects like the Synthetic Training Environment and One World Terrain.
Orlando, meanwhile, is home to I/ITSEC, a premier modeling-and-simulation defense conference.
The bottom line: "The whole premise was: Let's try to solve training in the air for the Air Force, in a way that's novel, that no one else has done," said Brandon Harris, the company's vice president of operations and chief pilot.
