The News-Star March 17, 2003
Simulator 'flies' over Iraq
By Leesha Faulkner / Education Editor
With war growing closer each day, a flight over Baghdad, Iraq, might prove instructive.
That's what Paul Karlowitz, director of the aviation department at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, provided via one of the department's simulators last week.
He programmed in Saddam International Airport on the simulator's computer and selected our first aircraft, a King Air 200. We climbed into the cockpit and took off.
The simulator, one of several used to train pilots at ULM, uses a global positioning satellite that features artificially generated topology of almost any region in the world.
"It's pretty accurate," Karlowitz said as we rumbled down the runway. Although we saw computer-generated images from our cockpit, the ground below us was put together from satellite imagery, he said.
For a point of contrast, Karlowitz took our simulated King Air from Saddam International back to the United States with a twist of some knobs so we could fly through the Grand Canyon. Plateaus rose to meet us. We flew low - about 75 feet over the ground and down into the canyon, similar to the way people fly when they hire tourist rides.
Another twist of the knob and we were sitting back on the long runway at Saddam International.
We took off, pushed gently back into our seats by the simulator's motion. Radio traffic crackled in the background.
"There's not a lot to see," Karlowitz pointed out as we flew over brown ground broken up with patches of green. "It's pretty flat - about like a table top," he said.
Our simulated flight program didn't include buildings. Saddam International is about 16 kilometers west of Baghdad in the suburbs, according to Global Security, a nonprofit security think tank in Alexandria, Va.
Analysis of Saddam International from Global Security points out the airport has two runways. The main one is 13,000 feet long. The secondary one is 8,800 feet long.
Our computer program showed the two different runways at the Iraqi-based airport. The rest proved accurate, too, according to satellite maps of the area around the airport from www.globalsecurity.org.
"All the way around it's flat, flat, flat," Karlowitz said.
The flight instructor at ULM is no stranger to the Middle East. He flew ambassadors, military officials and others around the region as late as 1988 from Saudi Arabia.
He chuckles as we switch to an F-16 fighter and take off from Saddam International.
He takes us straight up. Within seconds, we're high over Iraq and Karlowitz rolls the aircraft. Sally Davidson, assistant professor of aviation, comes into the room. She laughs at our excitement and marvels at the ability to fly anywhere in the world from the room.
"This is great," she grins.
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