Last month, military planners and intelligence personnel from Norway, Canada, New Zealand and the United States came together for an annual war games session that required the nations to finely orchestrate collaborative flying missions.

Nine military planners participating in one of the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration exercises collaborated successfully on a strike mission despite the fact that each had a different mission planning computer platform, working on laptops separated by up to 11,000 miles.

The tool that enabled them to do this faster and more cheaply than ever before was a new software product being marketed by Collaboration Technologies Inc., a startup based in the Quonset Business Park.

The Collaboration Technologies Mission Planning System software creates a virtual mission planning room where military personnel situated anywhere on the globe can meet to plan joint missions in real time, using their own computer programs that previously could not communicate with one another.

Surprisingly, such a system has not previously been used in the military flight planning world, said David Buckley, a part-owner of CTI and recently retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served until last year as director of operations for the R.I. Air National Guard.

“War fighter collaboration is still e-mailing, chat and telephone – still,” Buckley said. “And this results in the aviation field in missed rendezvous, increased risk to air crews – it just turns into a big mess.”

As an example, joint missions involving Army infantry and Air Force support units have historically been planned with each military branch using its own mission planning systems, such as the Army’s Command & Control Personal Computer and the Air Force’s Portable Flight Planning System.

Then, the mission planners would have to contact one another by radio, phone or e-mail to share their information and make the appropriate data insertions and updates from their partners on their own screens.

But CTI’s mission planning software links the dissimilar computer programs in a virtual planning room, so that whatever information is placed on the Air Force mission planner’s screen will be shown on the Army planner’s screen instantaneously, Buckley said.

CTI’s software also enables military software systems to interact with off-the-shelf software packages, so that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator can be inserted on each mission planner’s screen during a search and rescue mission, showing an overview of what the search pilot is seeing from the cockpit, said Ed Johnson, a sales representative for CTI and Capewell Components Co., a South Windsor, Conn.-based military contractor that has an ownership stake in CTI.

Buckley and Josh Trainer, CTI’s president, CEO and chief technology officer, developed their flagship mission planning software almost entirely from other software applications that have been used by the military for more than a decade, Buckley said.

The company recently scored its first major contract with the Royal Australian Air Force, and is working closely with U.S. Senator Jack Reed’s office to break into the lucrative world of Department of Defense contracts, he said.

A major selling point of the technology is its very low impact on IT infrastructure – it typically uses about half the bandwidth associated with a 56k dial-up modem. Because much of the U.S. military’s private data pipeline is taken up by layer after layer of security, bandwidth is “worth its weight in gold,” and the Department of Defense carefully considers any new capability that puts a further burden on the pipeline, Buckley said.

CTI is also exploring commercial applications for its software product, particularly in civilian emergency response planning and to help manufacturers with computer-aided design, he said.

Buckley and Johnson, who is a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, are old combat buddies who worked together for many years as commanders at Quonset and flew numerous combat missions together during Operation Desert Storm. Trainer, the company’s CEO, is a civilian software engineer and consultant at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport.

The partners have pursued an “upside-down” marketing approach, Buckley said, building grassroots demand for CTI’s mission planning system among war fighting personnel rather than seeking to sit down with a four-star general in hopes of scoring a big sale.

Last year, when they first introduced the system to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment in Fort Campbell, Ky., most of the fighter pilots grasped the new technology within three minutes, Buckley said.

“These are the tippy-point-of-the-spear guys in special operations, and we showed it to them and they went, ‘Yeah man. That’s exactly what we want,’ ” he said. •