Aerospace behemoth Boeing has announced a possibly worrying new breakthrough in simulators, revealing yesterday that company boffins have linked real combat aircraft into virtual training wargames.

According to Boeing, this is an "industry first". Apparently, a real F-15E Strike Eagle jet - one of America's most potent warplanes - was hooked up to a worldwide, massively multiplayer air battle game called the Distributed Mission Operations Network.

"Today's event marked a huge leap in demonstrating Boeing's state-of-the-art technology," Boeing veep Tony Jones said.

"To be able to link a real aircraft with a simulator and train is amazing. Most people just talk about this capability, but Boeing is delivering it."

Boeing reckons this kind of VR-mixed-with-reality will reduce training costs for multi-ship missions. They say "a training exercise that would have required six operational aircraft and aircrew now requires only one."

We'll leave it to you to speculate on the possible results of people on the ground being able to inject information including targets into the weapons displays of combat jets (though to be fair, people in AWACS planes or using ground air-defence radars have been able to do this for some time).

It seems ironic all the same that even real jet aces have to use MMOGs to get their kicks. A little more from Boeing here. ®

Related stories

• Pentagon: Our new robot army will be controlled by malware (6 November 2007)
• US military cyber warriors looking for a home (31 October 2007)
• Israel suspected of 'hacking' Syrian air defences (4 October 2007)
• Gaming 4G warfare for the USAF, with rayguns (2 August 2007)
• UK invades California in cyber MMORPG wargame (16 June 2007)
• RAF builds massively multiplayer flight sims (24 May 2007)
• CIA plays cyberwar game (27 May 2005)
• Chinese government censors online games (1 June 2004)