| Total In-Flight Simulator 50th Anniversary |
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| Oct 01 2005 | |
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Page 1 of 4 AFRL’s Total In-Flight Simulator is celebrating 50 years of service.
Advertisement: AFRL’s Total In-Flight Simulator (TIFS), a Convair C-131 Samaritan aircraft, entered service on March 22, 1955. The C-131 aircraft had performed various transport operations for approximately a decade up to that point, and the Air Force (AF) Flight Dynamics Laboratory—now AFRL— subsequently chose it for a very special mission: developing next-generation air vehicles. Performing extensive modification, AFRL transformed the airplane into TIFS, a one-of-a-kind simulator that engineers can program to simulate virtually any type of air vehicle, in flight, with six degrees of freedom. When most other C-131s left the AF’s active fleet in the late 1970s, TIFS was just beginning to support programs such as the space shuttle, B-1 and B-2 bombers, and numerous private sector tests and development efforts.  Figure 1. TIFS simulation cockpit configuration |
