Collective & Tactical Operations Training

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 mission. 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.

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 to collective operations, such as multi-crew and multi-platform coordination. Each trainee station is fully reconfigurable to simulate different multirole helicopter types, with pilot and co-pilot 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.