Want to see how an F-16 will react to the latest antiaircraft weapons? Tip Slater is your man. 

As director of virtual operations for The Boeing Company’s Integrated Defense Systems group, Slater is responsible for creating virtual environments that Boeing customers, chiefly the U.S. Department of Defense, use to test the latest wares and ideas. His team of engineers must collaborate effectively to make sure the events live up to customer expectations and go off without a hitch, especially considering a four-star general may well be looking on. Boeing uses various tools to collaborate among its far-flung business units, but Slater says it's the processes surrounding the tools that determine whether they do any good.

Can you describe what your job entails?

I belong to an organization called Analysis Modeling Simulation Experimentation. Our job is to create an environment in which we can test out concepts and ideas for our customers, the majority of which are military. If a customer wants to try a wartime scenario, he can’t afford to fly or move all the military [equipment] that he wants, and you can’t afford to blow it up either. So, we provide an environment where we bring in live, simulated and computer-generated entities. 

Click to see: Background of Tip Slater

Our job is to pull together this synthetic environment so that we can test out a concept or a hypothesis. For example, we can actually take an F-16 flying over the desert in southern California, and the pilot will see on his radar scope all of the virtual and computer-generated entities that we have in the environment. So, we’ve got a real plane that gets the signatures in his cockpit that state that there are other entities working around him, when in fact those entities are digital [creations]. And that allows us to put the assets into an environment and test them out. So it gets to be a very complicated environment.

And LabNet is the network that connects the various Boeing labs that may participate in these events?

Yes. We usually operate about 70 to 100 labs on the network at any one time. We’ve got the capability of connecting [all 700 Boeing labs], but we’ve never done it. The network is very fast and very capable. I can only handle probably 10 milliseconds of latency before the pilot actually sees it on the screen.