Motion Relationships in Aircraft Attitude and Guidance Displays: A Flight Experiment

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Sixteen nonpilot Naval ROTC students were tested on tasks involving conflicting visual and vestibular cues while flying with each of four basic aircraft attitude presentations (moving horizon, moving airplane, frequency-separated, and kinalog) in a Beechcraft C-45H airplane. Flight-director versions of each display presenting either compensatory or pursuit steering guidance were also compared on a command flight path tracking task involving random heading changes. For all attitude presentations, pursuit tracking was superior to compensatory tracking and the order of merit of the four attitude presentations in flight casts doubt upon the validity of previous simulator experiments. It was concluded that the principle of display frequency separation provides at least equivalent pilot steering performance to that obtained with the conventional moving horizon format, while the anticipatory cues it affords tends to reduce the incidence of control reversals under circumstances of subliminal angular acceleration by providing initial direction-of-motion compatibility.