Stereo Projections of Miss Distance in Some New Cockpit Display Formats

Abstract

The design basis of new display formats for multifunction and head-up displays is described. The purpose of the formats is to provide pilots with an immediate visualization of the potential danger of a midair collision. These formats incorporate adaptations of steering and guidance concepts used in the cockpit displays of military aircraft and consist of stereographic projections of critical directions around own aircraft One type of multifunction format is a color image, in which color indicates the expected miss distance from another aircraft for all hypothetical flight-path directions of own aircraft. It resembles a topographic map and enables a pilot to steer for the safe valleys and avoid the dangerous peaks that represent collisions. It thereby combines orientation information, as in the vertical situation display, with path information, as in the navigation display. In the complementary head-up format, a line plot of contours of constant miss distance serves as a monochrome display. The new display formats contain the essential three-dimensional information, unlike the current traffic alert and collision avoidance system displays, but do not have the complexity of three-dimensional perspective displays. Images are shown from a computer program that simulates the flight of the aircraft and generates the displays in the form of interactive animation. The aircraft paths can be set from input files or own aircraft can be flown manually from the keyboard, thereby enabling an engineering evaluation of the displays. Measures of the effectiveness of the format are evaluated using computer simulations based on a model of pilot responses.