FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



Contacts:   Jeffrey R. Hogue

            Systems Technology, Inc.

            310/679.2281, ext. 52

            jeffhogue@systemstech.com

            http://www.stiparasim.com

HAWTHORNE, Calif., April 7, 1997 -- Systems Technology, Inc. (STI) today announced that the company's Virtual Reality Parachute Flight Training Simulator was used to train former President Bush for his recent parachute jump in Yuma, Arizona. Bush had been forced to bail out of his Navy torpedo bomber in the south Pacific in 1944 when it was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. He was injured and his two fellow crewmen died. When addressing a Parachute Industry Association convention in Houston in February, he mentioned a long-held wish. Bush said, "I never really dwelled on making another jump, but it was always a thought in the back of my mind. Do it again and do it right." The United States Parachute Association (USPA) and the US Army's elite Golden Knights competition and demonstration team offered to make this happen.

In pursuit of this goal, they turned to STI for the use of the unique STI virtual reality training device. With this equipment, the trainee reaches proficiency on the ground, before any actual jumps. One specific STI design goal had been to produce a device to train pilots for emergency parachute situations without the risk of the risk of injuries or fatalities that had occurred during Bush's first jump.

USPA's Chris Needles said, "The STI VR simulator was an integral part of our training plan, right from the beginning. We set a requirement that whatever Bush was going to do, he was going to experience it himself first, as best as could be done, in advance of the actual jump. Simulation training was totally consistent with and an essential part of that training philosophy. I'm proud of thinking of calling and asking STI to help us achieve this."

On Monday, March 24, Bush hung in the simulator's parachute harness for 45 minutes of intensive but enjoyable training with 4600+jump-expert instructor Larry Pennington, who got a laugh with his comment "Takeoffs are optional, landings are mandatory, Mr. President." When Larry was satisfied that the simulator had taught Bush a high level of parachuting skills, he capped the experience with a nostalgic change from ground scenes to an aircraft carrier. On Tuesday, Bush's skills were warmed up with refresher training before his actual jump.

After his successful parachute jump, Bush thanked everyone, before departing for Italy for a visit with Pope John Paul II. Needles and Bush joked about convincing the skiing-enthusiast pontiff to go parachuting. Needles said that Bush commented: "Sure, and then we'll get Strom Thurmond to go next." To which Needles replied, "However, even with a training simulator, I wouldn't really want to take responsibility for teaching the pope parachuting; it's one thing to messing with the president, but to be messing with God, I don't know...."

"Right now, skydiving relies very heavily on classroom instruction and somebody on the ground with a ground to air radio giving control instructions. First of all, this is a physical skill which you can't learn with a blackboard. Second, the radio communication is one-way, doesn't always work, and the student doesn't always listen. You've got to ingrain in that student's mind that he is the master of his own fate. The only way that he is really going to know what to do is by using the simulator. If you get simulator training, you'll get Bush's soft tiptoe landing, even in the very strong winds that he had on the ground." said Chris Needles. "Besides, Bush really enjoyed it. It's not just for serious training, it's for serious fun also and belongs in the video arcades as well."

These VR systems are now in use with U.S. Marine Corps elite Force Reconnaissance units to safely teach, plan, and practice dangerous parachute missions. The delivery of these systems marked the first actual in-service training application of new low-cost, high-performance VR technology, which was originally developed to bring PC and arcade gamers the high level of visual realism found in extremely costly military and civilian professional training systems.

The STI systems combine a virtual reality head mounted display and tracker with the latest developments in low-cost high quality 3D texture-mapped graphics from 3Dfx Interactive. This produces a compelling, immersive and realistic environment which allows for obstacle tracking and avoidance, a view of malfunctions overhead, as well as the field of view and display rate to avoid common simulator sickness. Specific mission scenes can be created from digital map data and practiced with other recorded or networked jumpers.

"Parachute missions are difficult, expensive and hazardous to train, plan and practice in actual flight. Now that our systems are enhanced with 3Dfx Interactive's Obsidian graphics board and VR headset, operational personnel can plan and practice group missions at specific sites, trainees can deal with a variety of potential emergencies, and aircrew personnel can practice emergency procedures over scenes based on their anticipated actual operations," said Jeff Hogue, Principal Specialist at STI.

"The Obsidian graphics boards enable military and civilian visual simulation application developers, like STI, to deploy PC-based systems, thereby replacing proprietary image generator (IG) and workstation solutions which typically are ten times the cost for equivalent levels of 3D performance," said Ross Smith, general manager of 3Dfx Interactive's System Products Division. "The extension into this market is a further validation of the power of our 3D graphics platform."

Staff Sargent Edward Walsh of U.S. Marine Corps Camp LeJeune's 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company noted, "Parachute flight simulation visual requirements are far more challenging than for any conventional military aircraft, and classroom lectures cannot offer the practice necessary to develop skills. The STI simulator provides immediate assessment and solution of any canopy deployment problems and allows the user to set up and fly a landing pattern while scanning in all directions for team members, obstacles, and hostile forces."

Parachute Simulator Flight Training Requirements
Parachutes allow rapid deployment of operational mission specialists when fixed or rotary wing aircraft alone are inappropriate. However, parachutists who are injured on landing, or land in the wrong location, degrade or nullify operational effectiveness. Skillful parachuting is vital to mission success.

Military aircrew receive maneuverable parachutes for emergencies, but when these occur they have none of the options on landing terrain, wind maximums, hostile location, and time of day or night that are available to operational parachutists. The U.S. Air Force averages over 25 aircraft ejections per year and the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps over 50, of which over 90% are survivable. Of these, over half result in injuries or worse, and a significant number are related to parachute flight skills. Aircrew losses have enormous social, financial, political, and tactical costs. Although aircrew proficiency is critical, any actual flight training provided is limited to a towed upwind low altitude launch under benign conditions at beginning of their careers. Subsequent training has been limited to lectures and procedures drills in a suspended harness, because emergencies are rare events and because of the hazards of real parachuting flights to a highly (and very expensively) trained individual. Essential parachuting skills and self-confidence could not be developed.

Teaching parachute flight has always been a difficult task. Safe, accurate parachuting requires both training and the practice of perceptual skills. Parachutists must learn to accurately assess parachute opening status, sense visual motion cues, and to predict and manage their descent and drift toward the landing zone while avoiding obstacles. Traditional professional training techniques were limited to texts, lectures, procedures drills, and actual (but solo) flights. Physical skills can only be acquired through practice experiences, not classroom lectures.

Flight simulation training, long accepted as an essential (though very expensive) standard for military and commercial aircraft, provided a solution for the smokejumpers, parachuting forest fire fighters, whose organizations see directly the costs of injuries to their civilian employees. The same justifications that make aircraft simulation a success apply to parachute simulation: safety, availability, economy, and efficiency. STI developed a low cost system for the smokejumpers' budget, in collaboration with their instructors which met their training needs, but stayed within their limits. They reported reduced training costs and improved parachuting performance and safety.

STI has continued to deliver these systems to smokejumpers around the world over the past nine years. The military, who frequently train with smokejumpers, have been slowly adopting simulator use. The U.S. Navy has recently conducted an aircrew emergency parachute training evaluation at NAS Cecil Field, Florida. This study found a requirement for parachute simulator training but with better face-validity than provided by the previous low cost PC display technology, with its sparse graphics detail and monitor-based view limitations. STI has responded to these concerns with their new system, receiving an enthusiastic military response to a simulator experience which they report as closely replicating real world parachuting.

Obsidian Graphics Board Family Capabilities and Performance
Based on advanced configurations of 3Dfx Interactive's Voodoo Graphics 3D graphics chipset, the Obsidian graphics board family is optimized to deliver interactive 3D applications with photo-realistic quality at real-time frame rates to address a range of different commercial and professional 3D applications. The Obsidian graphics board family exploits the Voodoo Graphics chipset's patent-pending "texture streaming" architecture to deliver up to 2.4 Gigabytes per second of dedicated graphics memory bandwidth to real-time 3D applications. This highly dedicated memory bandwidth, coupled with the technology's on-chip "triangle set-up" engine, enables the various Obsidian graphics board products to render over one million texture mapped triangles per second and to sustain tri-linear filtered texture map fill rates at up to 100 Megapixels per second. Such levels of texture mapped performance are currently available only on high-end 3D workstations and dedicated image generators.

All of the 3D features supported by the Voodoo Graphics chipset are supported by the Obsidian graphics board family. Examples of such 3D features include perspective correction, sub-pixel and sub-texel correction, triangle set-up, depth-buffering, alpha-blending, tri-linear and bi-linear filtering with level-of-detail MIP mapping, and texture and polygonal anti-aliasing -- all of which are essential for visually realistic simulation and entertainment applications. In addition to its core 3D capabilities, applications deployed on the Obsidian graphics boards can take advantage of the Voodoo Graphics chipset's more advanced capabilities, including comprehensive alpha blending with support for translucency and transparency at both the polygon and texture level, projected and detailed texture mapping, environment mapping, texture morphing, per pixel fog and associated atmospheric effects, texture animation, video texture mapping, fast linear frame buffer access, high-bandwidth texture paging, and support for 13 different texture formats, including 8-bit palletized and 3Dfx patent-pending narrow channel compressed format. The Obsidian graphics boards are available in a variety of Voodoo Graphics chipset configurations with either 2, 4, or 8 MB of effective frame buffer memory and 2, 4 or 8MB of effective texture memory. Prices for the graphics boards, which are sold via 3Dfx Interactive's network of manufacturer's representives to OEMs, VARs, and system integrators range between $500 to $2,500.

Former President Bush's First Parachute Experience
George Bush is the only president to make a parachute jump. Bush bailed out of his crippled torpedo bomber after an attack on an island near Iwo Jima in August 1944. President George Bush made a surprise visit to the PIA's International Parachute Symposium held in Houston to retell the little-known story of his jump and to congratulate the industry on their products. Bush was presented with an identical parachute from the same 1943 production run by the Switlik Parachute Company of Trenton, New Jersey. It will be displayed in the Bush Presidential Museum along with an airplane like the one he flew.

Chi Chi Jima is an island in the Bonin Island group. It was the site of the Yoake radio relay station and a large antenna tower. This was an heavily defended essential Japanese radio link to the south Pacific, key to a Japanese carrier task force intent on stopping a US Marines assault on Peleliu. Lieutenant (jg) George Bush (at 20 years old the youngest flight officer in the US Navy) flew a single engine torpedo bomber, named after his girl friend Barbara, off from the tiny carrier San Jacinto, with a total crew of three in the attack on the tower. He strafed, bombed and demolished the tower, but took a hit. The ruptured oil line caused smoke and fire. He could not see his instruments. He turned the aircraft out to sea and called to his two crewmen to bail out. Then the aircraft lost power.

Bush climbed out, but pulled the ripcord early. He hit his head on the tail of the plane. His parachute struck the horizontal stabilizer but ripped free. Bush was stunned by the blow to his head. As he was descending under the torn canopy, he unbuckled his harness and dropped the last 20' into the sea. He inflated his vest, but lost the life raft which was attached to his harness. His fellow aviators flew low over him and signaled the direction of his raft. He swam toward it and climbed in. His crew were never seen again.

The wind was blowing him toward the island, as he paddled away with his hands for over 2 hours. The Japanese sent out boats to intercept him but Bush's fellow pilots strafed the boats and turned them around. He was seasick, groggy and vomiting. He was rescued at last by the submarine USS Finback.

The Organizations
Systems Technology, Inc. is an employee-owned research, consulting engineering, and product development firm located in Hawthorne, California. They specialize in vehicle dynamics and control and related human factors. For almost forty years they have been involved in research and design related to a wide range of aerospace, automotive, and marine vehicles. Their work in aerospace and defense has involved dynamic analysis, flight control system design, and flying qualities of fighters, transports, VSTOL, rotorcraft, the space shuttle, rockets, and missiles. Their automotive work has involved vehicle dynamics, handling qualities, transportation safety, driver behavior, and forensic engineering. They have performed this research and developed performance specifications for customers including the US Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, NASA and many of the major aerospace and automotive firms. Their research has also led to the development and marketing of specialized analytical software as well as low cost simulators and human performance assessment devices. STI is a PIA member. For more information about Systems Technology, Inc., visit the company's Website at http://www.systemstech.com.

3Dfx Interactive, Inc., founded in 1994, is a privately held company headquartered in San Jose, California. 3Dfx Interactive brings together a team of leading professionals from the 3D graphics, video game, multimedia, PC, and semiconductor industries to provide advanced technology that enables new levels of interactive 3D electronic entertainment and visual simulation. Consumer PC, multimedia and coin-op/arcade OEMs have announced support for the critically-acclaimed Voodoo Graphics chipset, including Acclaim Entertainment, Diamond Multimedia, Digital Vehicles, Hewlett-Packard Company, Falcon Northwest, Interactive Light, Micron Computers, NEC Technologies, Orchid Technologies, and Williams-Atari-Bally-Midway. Visual simulation companies that announced support for Voodoo Graphics include Systems Technology, SAIC, Datapath, Gemini Technology, Reality by Design, MaK Technology, MetaVR and McFadden Entertainment Systems. For more information about 3Dfx Interactive, visit the company's Website at http://www.3Dfx.com.

The United States Parachute Association mission is "To promote safe skydiving and to support those who enjoy it." USPA was originally established in 1946 as the National Parachute Jumpers and Riggers Association. In 1957, it became the Parachute Club of America (PCA), and in 1968, it was renamed the United States Parachute Association. There are more than 34,000 recreational skydivers in the U.S., most of whom are members of USPA. As a not-for-profit, voluntary association, USPA is the principal voice of skydivers in this country. USPA operates under a 22-member board of directors. These directors, both National and Regional, are elected by the membership every two years. As a part of its mission to promote the safe enjoyment of the sport of skydiving in the U.S., USPA establishes basic safety guidelines and recommendations, issues licenses, certifies skydiving instructors, sanctions national competitions, selects U.S. skydiving teams for international competition and publishes Parachutist magazine. For more information about the USPA, visit their Website at http://www.uspa.org.

The Parachute Industry Association is a trade organization of more than 200 manufacturers and dealers from all over the world. They promote safety, cooperation on manufacturing, and other standards for parachuting. They have an International Symposium every two years to promote the safe use of parachutes. For more information about the PIA, visit their Website at http://www.pia.com.

The United States Army Parachute Team, "Golden Knights," is the Army's only official aerial demonstration team. Since its inception in 1959 at the "Home of the Airborne," Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the men and women of this team have come to be recognized as the Army's Goodwill Ambassadors. The Golden Knights have performed more than 9,000 live aerial demonstrations throughout all 50 states and in 45 foreign countries. They have provided nearly 100 national and 22 world champions during 35 years of performing and competing in the name of the United States Army. For more information about the Golden Knights, visit their Website at http://www.usarec.army.mil/goldn/goldn.htm.

Trademarks: Voodoo and Obsidian Graphics are a trademarks of 3Dfx Interactive, Inc,. All other brand names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders, and are hereby acknowledged.


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