Aviate, Navigate: Functional Visualizations of Asymmetric Flight Envelope Limits

Abstract

Current aircraft flight deck interfaces do not provide information on how a performance-altering failure constrains the aircraft's flight envelope. As a result, it is difficult for flight crews to plan an emergency landing trajectory. This study presents the results of the conceptual development of novel constraint-based interface symbology that aims to solve this issue. As no fully functional on-line flight envelope prediction system implementations currently exist, a simplified dynamical model with an asymmetric flight envelope was developed to overcome this limitation. The proposed interface symbology integrates with the existing primary flight display and navigation display. A human-in-the-loop experiment was conducted to validate the effectiveness of the used symbology. The results lend credibility to the belief that presenting flight envelope constraints in terms of reachable navigation states may improve short-term tactical planning and reduce the pilot's mental workload during emergency situations.