In 2009, an important aircraft manufacturer committed to the Temporary Business Association between S.A.S. Group S.r.l. and Bertolotti S.p.A. the realization of a military airlift Fuselage Trainer (FuT). ARES S.r.l. has been in charge of the project management (the CEO of SAS was the program manager), the technical office activities and the manual redaction. As outcome of the development of this project, the ALTAIR Consortium has been instituted by S.A.S. Group and ARES with the aim to join their skills and capabilities. Two other companies joined the consortium in 2011, so at now four companies are the partners of ALTAIR.
The FuT is a training device - Level 2 designed in order to train the military loadmasters in the loading and unloading procedures with the aircraft systems operative as in the real aircraft.
The realization of a specific ground based training system also allows the integrated flight crew training, with the saving of more than 60% of the operative aircraft time for training activities which leads to cost decreasing together with staff and aircrew safety improvement, and less aircraft damage hazard, with subsequent aircraft on ground condition and repair need.
The FuT has been obtained from the modification of a dismissed fuselage - aircraft previous version, updated to the newest internal configuration.
Before and after delivery to the final user, some test campaigns were performed. At the end in June 2010, after the installation of the simulator, S.A.S. Group and ARES S.r.l. supplied the first training course to final operator staff, which will provide the loadmaster training to military personnel and the maintenance of the device.
The present paper describes the activities summarized above; in addition it shows how the experience gathered with this project could be applied to develop other training simulators for a number of military and civilian aircrafts as well as helicopters.