Hungary Acquired Helicopter Mission Trainer (HMT)

Thales, May 20, 2019 - A NATO member since 1999, the Hungarian Air Force needs to train its Mi-24 attack helicopter and Mi-17 transport helicopter aircrews for NATO-led collective and tactical missions.

The Hungarian Defence Forces also need to train helicopter crews for homeland defence operations.

In 2018, Hungary acquired a Helicopter Mission Trainer (HMT) from Thales. In service with the Hungarian Air Force from early 2019, the HMT trainer has been used for many years by French Army Light Aviation (under the name EDITH) to enable pilots to acquire and develop the tactical skills they need for collective operational missions.

Thanks to Thales's expertise in simulation, the Hungarian Defence Forces will now be able to improve the tactical training of attack helicopter aircrews. The HMT trainer designed and delivered by Thales allows aircrews to train collectively in a diverse array of programmable tactical scenarios, such as combat search and rescue, airland and naval operations or even commando insertion / extraction.

The HMT trainer can be configured to allow individual pilot and commander training as well as training of entire helicopter aircrews for collective operations, such as multicrew and multiplatform coordination. Thanks to the system's innovative design, each trainee station is fully reconfigurable to simulate different multirole helicopter types, with pilot and copilot in side-by-side position or attack helicopters with front-behind layout.

It features virtual reality gunner stations so that rear aircrew members can be included in the collective training. It provides the tools needed for mission debriefing and after-action review. And its compatibility with the Distributed Interactive Simulation and High-level architecture standards offers huge scope for interconnection with other systems as part of broader combined arms training.

The HMT trainer's highly realistic virtual environment leverages the ThalesView image generator and the Computer-Generated Forces (CGF) Artificial Intelligence software suite from Thales, with smart animation of multiple virtual entities to create a wide variety of training scenarios, enabling aircrews to acquire and develop the tactical skills they need at every decisive moment and prepare for mission success.

EDITH in the French Army Light Aviation

Back in 2015, for the first time, two French Army simulation centres physically located more than 150 kilometres apart in Eastern France were connected together to operate as a network, with a total of 12 simulated helicopters interacting in the same tactical scenario. Both simulation centres are equipped with the Helicopter Mission Trainer (HMT), a multi-platform tactical training system developed by Thales, which also incorporates a powerful Computer Generated Forces (CGF) system from Thales to animate a realistic virtual tactical environment.