Designing an obstacle display for helicopter operations in degraded visual environment

Abstract

Flying in degraded visual environment is an extremely challenging task for a helicopter pilot. The loss of the outside visual reference causes impaired situation awareness, high workload and spatial disorientation leading to incidents like obstacle or ground hits. DLR is working on identifying ways to reduce this problem by providing the pilot with additional information from fused sensor data. Therefore, different display design solutions are being developed. In a first study, the design focused on the use of a synthetic head-down display, considering different representations for obstacles, color coding and terrain features. Results show a subjective preference for the most detailed obstacle display, while objective results reveal better performance for the display with little lower detail. Due to the fact that attention is limited, a very complex representation might actually hinder fast and accurate information processing in a high workload situation respectively when divided attention is required. In a second study, symbology for a helmet-mounted display is being designed and will be evaluated in autumn 2012. Design considerations will focus on different levels of terrain transparency, shape, size and complexity of obstacles and associated visual and perceptual aspects (e.g. attentional tunneling).