Use of highways in the sky and a virtual pad for landing head up display symbology to enable improved helicopter pilots situation awareness and workload in degraded visual conditions

Abstract

Flight within degraded visual conditions is a great challenge to pilots of rotary-wing craft. Environmental cues typically used to guide interpretation of speed, location and approach can become obscured, forcing the pilots to rely on data available from in-cockpit instrumentation. To ease the task of flight during degraded visual conditions, pilots require easy access to flight critical information. The current study examined the effect of “Highways in the Sky” symbology and a conformal virtual pad for landing presented using a Head Up Display (HUD) on pilots’ workload and situation awareness for both clear and degraded conditions across a series of simulated rotary-wing approach and landings. Results suggest that access to the HUD lead to significant improvements to pilots’ situation awareness, especially within degraded visual conditions. Importantly access to the HUD facilitated pilot awareness in all conditions. Results are discussed in terms of future HUD development.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Neville A. Stanton: orcid.org/0000-0002-8562-3279

ORCID for Katherine L. Plant: orcid.org/0000-0002-4532-2818

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics