Raytheon first entered into an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1981 to develop AFATDS and received its first contract in 1984. AFATDS was approved for fielding in 1996.

According to the Army’s statement, AFATDS has supported operations in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

AFATDS is 100 percent fielded with more than 4,000 systems. The newest version is expected to be fielded in fiscal year 2020.

Raytheon said it couldn’t provide specifics on award values over the course of the program, but sources say it was a lucrative endeavor for the company. Raytheon successfully fielded 13 versions since 1984.

The company would not disclose if it planned to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), but, a spokesman told Defense News on Wednesday, “Our proposed AFATDS solution leverages our extensive experience and proven performance across a broad spectrum of Command and Control programs. We plan to attend the post-award debrief and welcome the US Army’s feedback.”

While the Army would not respond to follow-up questions regarding competition details, following the release of its statement, other competitors included General Dynamics Mission Systems and Northrop Grumman, Defense News has learned.

GD’s response Wednesday was similar to Raytheon’s. A company spokesman said GD was “disappointed” by the decision on the AFATDS competition and also “look[s] forward to receiving a debrief later this week from the Army.”

The service said in its statement, by choosing Leidos it “used a best value, trade-off source selection via a full and open competitive strategy. Based on the market research results, the government pursued a full and open competition to implement the most innovative industry approach possible to address AFATDS 7.0 requirements while reducing risk and continuing to implement new capabilities.”

Rockwell Collins on Monday is introducing Coalescence at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida. Two demos will be showcased at the company’s booth: an F/A-18 “ready room” where pilots prepare for a flight from an aircraft carrier, and a ship bridge simulation.

“The advantage would be to have a very small footprint on an aircraft carrier” that would allow F/A-18 pilots at sea to prepare for and practice missions before they step into the cockpit and execute, Gibbs said.

“It would be a cost-reduced, highly improved fidelity environment to what exists today,” he said. “What that would look like today is you might be in that same cockpit looking at a computer monitor, not really immersed in your aircraft.”

The system can be configured several ways. One method is to mate an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with existing simulation equipment, and pipe data from the simulator into the headset. At I/ITSEC, Rockwell Collins is showing how Coalescence works with an Oculus Rift and typical military hardware not hooked up to a simulator — items like a cockpit, displays and controls — which are integrated with the company’s core simulation architecture and a synthetic environment.

According to Gibbs, the “secret sauce” is how the software figures out what elements from the real world to bring into the virtual world and how to solve latency issues that may arise. For instance, in a situation where a person is holding a ball and then throws it to the user, the user needs to be able to see that ball and catch it without the simulated visuals lagging behind.

The technology isn’t quite ready for full-flight simulators yet, but it’s quickly approaching the resolution and fidelity needed, Gibbs said.

” Moore’s lawis working here pretty hard, so it won’t be long. It will be a couple of years for sure,” he said, referring to the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, who anticipated that computing would increase in power and decrease in relative cost at an exponential pace.

Rockwell Collins plans to make Coalescence available in 2017, but the company is still looking for its first customer. Gibbs believes it could be adapted for a variety of missions including joint tactical air control, dismounted soldier, driver training and even some rotary-wing applications. But although the company is considering proposing it for several programs of record, it has already run into a problem — the technology has outpaced the currently defined requirements.

Gibbs summarized his argument to the US military as: “Let’s identify a set of requirements that satisfies the training needs assessment for the program, and enable those to be satisfied by different and new technology.”

One selling point could be the cost. The company is still solidifying its cost model, but Gibbs said it will be “orders of magnitude less” than the $6 million to $10 million price tag of most flight simulators.