Pilot's Associate: a minute of flight, two hours of computing

In March 1988 the Lockheed and US Air Force team, and in June the McDonnell Aircraft team, gave the second demonstration of the Pilot's Associate, a DARPA and Air Force programme begun in February 1986 for Strategic Computing: expert systems assisting a pilot in a simulated cockpit. At McDonnell fully integrated software supported only one of six mission segments: a minute of flight took about two hours of processing.

Teams led by Lockheed-Georgia Company and McDonnell Aircraft Company began development after a competition in fiscal 1986, per DARPA's budget of February 1987. Lockheed gave Demo 2 in a laboratory cockpit driven by six Symbolics machines and a VAX and, since it was not in real time, produced a real-time replay of the mission. McDonnell worked on six Explorers and a microVAX in ART from Inference Corporation. Its repeat, Demonstration 2X, was set for February 1989 with a goal of 10 to 1: a single-ship mission against a column of tanks at a nominal 200 feet and 450 knots, the aircraft modelled on the F-15, the cockpit in a 40-foot dome. Lockheed held Demo 3 in November 1989; McDonnell's was not scheduled until October 1990. What the record does not claim: Lockheed's IEEE Expert paper was read only in snippets from the Internet Archive's full-text search; the rest comes from the Wright Laboratory paper for AGARD, which describes the McDonnell team. No document read gives contract values. That later demonstrations truly ran in real time: the authors write that the 2X system was a functional skeleton and that claims of real time must be judged with that caveat.