EDA’s prototype Tactical Personnel Recovery Mission Simulator (TPRMS) was officially inaugurated on 18 November in Italy after achieving Initial Operational Capability (IOC). The new simulator marks a significant achievement for the European Personnel Recovery community as no such capability currently exists with Europe.
An inauguration ceremony was organised at Italian Air Base Poggio-Renatico, the host organisation of the TPRMS. The formal opening was followed by a live immersion experience within the TPRMS where participants had the opportunity to engage in an immersive virtual reality simulation of Personnel Recovery (PR) missions.
TPRMS from concept to capability
The TPRMS project was launched in April 2019 as a proof-of-concept demonstrator with an objective to test and evaluate a technical solution that uses Virtual Reality (VR) technology and simulation-based software that when put together can quickly and easily create a customisable and highly realistic operational environment. The simulator which can create conditions from across the globe offers an opportunity for PR forces to rehearse PR Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) in a risk-free environment.
The development of TPRMS is conducted within a four-year timeframe (2019-2022) and is run jointly and co-financed by the European Defence Agency and the Italian Ministry of Defence, which is acting as the project Lead Nation and Host Nation through its Air Forces.
TPRMS also aims to demonstrate that such a capability provides at an affordable cost an immersive style of training that allows joint PR forces to hone their skills in a risk free environment that still offers a rigorous, realistic and repetitive PR training. EDA’s TPRMS project is a first step towards the creation of a European common approach in training joint PR forces through simulation and as a key enabler to the joint PR training process.
EDA Chief Executive, Jiří Šedivý said: “The TPRMS project demonstrates EDA’s enduring engagement in supporting its Member States efforts in aiming to find affordable and well-proven technical solutions that can contribute to overcome existing capability gaps for training within the EU, in this case in the PR area”.
Project Team Personnel Recovery Meeting
The event was organised back-to-back with EDA’s 40TH Project Team Personnel Recovery (PT PR) meeting and was attended by PR experts from seven EU Member States (Czech Republic, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania) and three international organisations with expertise in Personnel Recovery (the European Personnel Recovery Centre/EPRC, the Joint Air Power Coordination Centre/JAPCC and the Air Operations Centre of Excellence/CASPOA).