When Leonardo opens its training academy at its Northeast Philadelphia Airport facility—planned for the summer of 2020—it will be home to the first level D full-flight tiltrotor simulator. But until then, the closest thing to actually flying the AW609 is the System Integration Simulator (SiSL) used by engineers and test pilots to explore and validate modifications before they go onto the aircraft. It is also used to develop and rehearse flight-test programs, among other duties. The cockpit section of the SiSL is located at the far end of a very large room, mounted on a fixed-base raised stage and facing a 180-degree wrap-around visual screen, approximately 15 feet high. The remainder of the room is filled on one side with racks of computers and on the other, various engineering and operating work stations.
Dan Wells, one of Leonardo’s team of test pilots, is going to give me my first lesson in flying tiltrotors. Wells has been with the program since the early days and has amassed 690 hours on the 609. Before this, he was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, and flew the V-22 and CV-22, both with the military and as a production test pilot with Bell.
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