A Primary Flight Display Vastly Improves Situational Awareness and Accuracy of Flight

Abstract

This paper provides some of the results obtained from a series of flight tests with subject pilots comparing conventional instruments with a prototype configurable primary flight display with synthetic vision and a dynamic highway-in-the-sky flight paths Conventional instrumentation includes six primary flight instruments and a course deviation indicator to indicate instantaneous aircraft deviation left or right of the desired path. The conventional instrumentation evolved to provide the sole means necessary for a pilot to control and navigate an aircraft in instrument meteorological conditions. Flying an approach with the conventional instrumentation is reactive rather than predictive. The pilot reacts to changes by the aircraft on the basis of what he sees on the primary flight instruments. Originally these instruments were mechanical devices and their basic design for general aviation aircraft has not changed significantly in the past 50 years. The advent of the global positioning system and advances in electronic display technology have yielded configurable flight displays of reasonable size, good sunlight readability, high reliability, and low cost. It became worthwhile to investigate alternative concepts for the primary flight instruments as a way to reduce total flight error for precision flight.