Today pilots have to obtain required information from a number of different sources like airport/SID/STAR/approach or
enroute charts (respectively their electronic representations), printouts like the flight plan or a weather briefing, and
updates via voice communications. The flight crew is required to mentally combine all this information. This situation
will become even more difficult to cope with in the SESAR/NextGen world with dynamic changes of the trajectory
(flight plan), and more frequent updates of weather, NOTAMs and other information requiring a higher degree of
automation and better information presentation.
To address these issues, lower the pilot's workload, and increase his situational awareness, a concept is presented where
all required information is provided through one application. Depending on the phase of flight (taxi-in/taxi-out,
departure, enroute, arrival, approach) the application will select the currently required information and provide a
seamless representation for the crew. The challenge is to provide the right information at the right time to the crew (e.g.
significant weather moving into the direction of the flight plan).
The focus of this paper will be on the components of the new application related to ground operations. This includes an
enhanced, AMM-like view with integrated taxi-routing support, graphical and textual display of chart notes (e.g.
wingspan restrictions, taxiway closures etc.), and updates of such information by automatic inclusion of digital
NOTAMs.
Synthetic vision systems (SVS) are studied for some time to improve pilot's situational awareness and lower their
workload. Early systems just displayed a virtual outside view of terrain, obstacles or airport elements as it could also be
perceived through the cockpit windows in absence of haze, fog or any other factors impairing visibility. Required digital
terrain, obstacle and airport databases have been developed and standardized by Jeppesen as part of the NASA Aviation
Safety Program.
Newer SVS displays also introduced different kinds of flight guidance symbology to help pilots to improve the overall
flight precision. The method studied in this paper is to display navigation procedures in the form of guidance channels.
First releases of the described system used static channels, generated once at the startup at the system or even offline.
While this approach is very resource friendly for the avionics hardware, it does not consider the users, which want the
system to respond to the current flight conditions dynamically.
Therefore, a new application has been developed which generates both the general channel trajectory as well as the
channel depiction in a fully dynamic way while the pilot flies a navigation procedure.
Helicopters are widely used for operations close to terrain such as rescue missions; therefore all-weather capabilities are
highly desired. To minimize or even avoid the risk of collision with terrain and obstacles, Synthetic Vision Systems
(SVS) could be used to increase situational awareness. In order to demonstrate this, helicopter flights have been
performed in the area of Zurich, Switzerland
A major component of an SVS is the three-dimensional (3D) depiction of terrain data, usually presented on the primary
flight display (PFD). The degree of usability in low level flight applications is a function of the terrain data quality.
Today's most precise, large scale terrain data are derived from airborne laser scanning technologies such as LIDAR
(light detection and ranging). A LIDAR dataset provided by Swissphoto AG, Zurich with a resolution of 1m was used.
The depiction of high resolution terrain data consisting of 1 million elevation posts per square kilometer on a laptop in
an appropriate area around the helicopter is challenging. To facilitate the depiction of the high resolution terrain data, it
was triangulated applying a 1.5m error margin making it possible to depict an area of 5x5 square kilometer around the
helicopter.
To position the camera correctly in the virtual scene the SVS had to be supplied with accurate navigation data. Highly
flexible and portable measurement equipment which easily could be used in most aircrafts was designed.
Demonstration flights were successfully executed in September, October 2005 in the Swiss Alps departing from Zurich.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.