A piloted simulation of three head-down display (HDD) concepts with flight-director guidance superimposed on forward-looking infrared (FLIR) imagery was performed to evaluate the task of low-level, terrain-following (TF), manual helicopter flight. The three display concepts were examined for the purpose of finding ways by which aircraft flight-attitude and command symbols and FLIR imagery could be integrated onto one instrument. In all cases, the FLIR imagery was centered on the flight-path vector of the aircraft. The three displays were then characterized by having 1) pitch attitude conformal to the FLIR imagery; 2) pitch attitude conformal to the FLIR imagery, but with an increase in the scaling; and 3) pitch attitude nonconformal to the FLIR imagery with the same pitch scaling as in (2). The simulation was conducted on the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) at Ames Research Center, using NASA and Air Force test pilots. The pilots performed the TF task (over various types of terrain characteristics) by following flight-director symbols derived from terrain-following and course-steering guidance developed for the HH-60D helicopter. The pilots indicated that the nonconformal pitch attitude and FLIR display was the preferred way to display information because of the absence of pitchattitude information on displays (1) and (2) during some portions of the operational flight envelope and because of the difficulty in interpreting pitch attitude with displays (1) and (2) even when available.
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