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. Practitioner Summary: This paper explores the use of a novel Heads Up Display, to facilitate rotary-wing pilots' situation awareness and workload for simulated flights in both clear and degraded visual conditions. Results suggest that access to HUD facilitated pilots' situation awareness, especially when flying in degraded conditions.

Seeing through the mist: an evaluation of an iteratively designed head-up display, using a simulated degraded visual environment, to facilitate rotary-wing pilot situation awareness and workload

“…Two questionnaires were administered to participants in order to collect subjective ratings of situation awareness and workload, a Post-Landing Assessment (Stanton et al 2016(Stanton et al , 2017(Stanton et al , 2019 and the Bedford Workload scale (Roscoe and Ellis 1990). The questionnaires were administered immediately following each simulated flight.…”

“…The aim of the current work is to develop and test novel head-up display (HUD) technologies that can be used to facilitate rotary-wing flight in degraded visual conditions in order to increase safe operational capabilities. This work is a continuation of previous HUD development work seeking to improve rotary-wing pilots' situation awareness and optimise pilot workload, especially within degraded visual conditions (Stanton et al 2016(Stanton et al , 2017(Stanton et al , 2019. Although HUDs have been well researched and documented within fixed-wing aircraft, their use in rotary-wing aircraft is limited and specific research is required to understand whether the insights gained from work within fixed-wing is applicable to this domain.…”

“…A third application of the HUD is the presentation of an integrated graphic flight path representation, often termed "Highway in the Sky' (HITS, Thomas and Wickens 2004). The primary objective of the HITS is to facilitate the pilot's ability to successfully aviate and navigate (Alexander et al 2003), with previous research demonstrating that the use of HITS can facilitate the descent and landing phases of rotary-wing operations (Stanton et al 2019).…”

“…Conformal symbology leads to faster detection response to changes in symbology and improved flight path tracking accuracy (Fadden et al 1998;Snow and French 2002). HITS lead to increased maintenance of lateral and vertical flight path awareness (Williams et al 2001) and facilitate pilot performance during descent and landing (Stanton et al 2019). In addition, the inclusion of synthetic terrain features within a HUD significantly improves situation awareness (Snow and Reising 1999).…”

“…3. Access to the HUD will not have a negative effect on pilots' situation awareness or workload during flight in clear visual conditions (Stanton et al 2017(Stanton et al , 2019.…”