Mission Planning for Air Cushioned Vehicles

ACV planners are provided poor tools for conducting all aspects of mission planning: paper checklists, lookup tables for load management and fuel settings, and a hard to use navigation system. ViPER-ACV provides a combined suite of planning data and services tailored to support the ACV crew. An AI driven load and fuel planning application that incorporates current lookup tables and adapts its models as actual craft performance is observed. An automated navigation planner that searches DNCs for key features, creating stay out areas and ingesting the operational plan overlays. A comms planner to validate comms lineup vs. Theater and Group requirements. And a 4D user interface to manage it all, allowing mission rehearsal, and post mission replay of downloaded craft data from the DTD. ViPER-ACV provides the crew a ruggedized tablet for use on the craft, incorporating all publications, and digitizing the checklists, operations and casualty procedures (OCP), and the planning capabilities above.  With ViPER-ACV, the crew can conduct a rapid assessment of requested USMC Serials for feasibility of the load and fuel plan, integrate the mission plan and navigation plan to animate a mission rehearsal for briefing and crew prep, can integrate the downloaded DTD data from all craft to update craft performance models, and provide a post-mission debrief playback capability for crew training and lessons learned. The powerful addition of tablet-based plan management and publications will improve the efficiency of the crew in gathering reference information and decision-making, enabling the crew to spend less time conducting tedious administrative tasks, and more time focusing on mission readiness and craft safety.