The Effect of Synthetic Vision Enhancements on Landing Flare Performance

Abstract

The usage of heads-down, non-conformal synthetic vision displays for landings below minimums has inherent problems during the flare due to minification effects. Literature showed that pilots can use four visual cues to perform a manual flare maneuver. Amongst their strategies, the Jacobson flare method seemed the most suitable to provide flare initiation and flare control cues. Offline, linear simulation results indicated that the Jacobson method was robust and its performance was comparable to an automatic landing system. An enhanced synthetic vision display was designed offering support cues to aid pilots with this landing method. An experiment was conducted in a fixed-based simulator with eight professional pilots and eight novice pilots. The enhanced display was tested against a basic version and conventional primary flight display with outside visuals. Each pilot group was split into two groups with different display orders to check for possible learning effects. The experiment showed that touchdown position was not affected by display type. The enhanced display did achieve softer touchdown sink rates compared to the basic version. The softest landings were done on outside visuals. A strong learning curve was also observed for the group of pilots that first flew with the enhanced display: this translated into better achieved performances with subsequent displays. Therefore, it could be a valuable tool for basic flight training and reduce the number of flight hours required in mastering the landing flare.

Robust Landing Guidance Law for Impaired Aircraft

“…(18)(19)(20) are next denoted by pseudocontrol variables U x , U y , and U z to define the transformed dynamics of the aircraft. Note that the system is in linear, time-invariant, and decoupled form in terms of the pseudo-control variables.…”

“…Heffley [17] conducted closed-loop analysis of the flare maneuver using linear models that were derived from manual landings of real and simulated aircraft. Arents et al [18] and Ngoc et al [19] studied the impact of synthetic vision on landing guidance and the flare maneuver. Prasad and Pradeep [20] used the technique of feedback linearization for developing an autolanding system for a fighter aircraft.…”

Design and Evaluation of a Haptic Aid for Training of the Manual Flare Manoeuvre

“…This research also showed potential as a possible training tool. 6,7 Further development of this SVS, by incorporating the change in aiming point in the beginning of the flare as proposed by Robson,8 revealed a possible benefit in providing a standard flaring framework as such. 9 The concepts used in the above research are mainly focused on guiding the trainees towards the correct timing of the maneuver and therefore do not support the execution of the full, correct, flare trajectory (i.e., the altitude path from flare initiation to touchdown).…”