Development of Interactive Electronic Checklists & Manuals for Navy Helicopter In‐flight Operations

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of a research effort to design an electronic version of a Navy helicopter NATOPS flight manual and applicable checklists for use by aircrews during normal and emergency in‐flight operations. The general concept for an Interactive Electronic NATOPS (IE‐NATOPS) is to provide a pilot in the cockpit with a computer‐based presentation of the information that is currently provided in hard‐copy manuals, providing operating information and procedures that are specific to each Navy aircraft. For the Navy, as well as for virtually all other military and commercial aviation applications, the benefits seem obvious ‐ context sensitivity, fast and cheap “updatability”, and the capacity for embedded intelligence and embedded intelligent training. The initial research efforts focused on the H‐46 helicopter, but switched to the SH‐60F, because of Navy plans to develop new H‐60 helicopters and phase out the H‐46. A prototype IE‐NATOPS “electronic kneeboard” system has been developed for the SH‐60F, including a capability to integrate with the aircraft alerting systems. In this paper a summary of two studies conducted on information requirements, on SH‐60F IE‐NATOPS design, and an evaluation of performance characteristics in emergency problem prosecution between baseline hard copy NATOPS and IE‐NATOPS will be presented.