Aviation Week Editorial Mentioning MVIS
I saw mention of the following AWST Editorial in earlier posts and thought some investors' copies of AWST may not have arrived in the mail yet. The MVIS mention is near the end.
Aviation Week and Space Technology, 8 March 1999
EDITORIAL in .Vol. 150, No. 10; Pg. 70
A New Vision Of Cockpit Displays
I have been in many different cockpits in my four decades of flying. By my last count, I have flown 120 different aircraft types. During those years, cockpit displays have gone from being basic round dial instruments to better round dial presentations to very sophisticated alphanumeric ones on multifunction displays with living color. This evolutionary process has comprised a series of steps in the right direction to raise situational awareness. What we need, however, is not more evolution, but a revolution.
The amount of change during those decades was brought home to me earlier this month. I had the opportunity to fly in a U.S. Air Force U-2 with the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale AFB, Calif. The 40-year-old technology embodied in the Lockheed Martin aircraft was a look at the past. But even the venerable Dragon Lady is due to receive new cockpit displays within 2 years.
The avionics industry has the opportunity to initiate development of a revolutionary approach to situational awareness. And that has the strong potential of reducing airline accidents. Look at the accident statistics on p. 41 in this week's magazine. A recent study report from the Flight Safety Foundation says almost 80% of airline fatalities result from controlled-flight-into-terrain or approach-and- landing accidents. The biggest reason for such accidents, the report says, is pilots' failure to make critical decisions, or making wrong decisions at crisis times. The report cites lack of positional awareness as the second leading cause.
Even though there has been great progress in presenting aircraft performance and navigation data, current display technology still has the pilot reading and interpreting letters and numbers -- even for such basic parameters as altitude and airspeed. Then pilots have to convert these multiple alphanumeric inputs into a view of the world outside the cockpit. Anything that is done to hasten this visualization, or make it more accurate and realistic, will improve the pilot's situational awareness.
I am told there is $ 10 million in the current NASA budget to study new cockpit display technology. This money is being eyed by an avionics manufacturer and at least one airline to help develop head-up display formats fusing radar and infrared inputs. These advances would constitute another step forward for airline safety. But it would not be the major jump that is needed. What is needed is a ''virtual cockpit'' that does not rely on information displayed as letters and numbers, but instead on graphic displays. Actually, a synthetic vision approach to cockpit displays has been around for awhile. Cdr. George Hoover developed the highway-in-the-sky approach for the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. The U.S. Air Force Avionics Lab at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, has studied synthetic vision for years. The far-thinking Gene Adams of McDonnell Douglas had his own version of graphic display. And, Microvision and Boeing are developing a virtual-reality cockpit using a helmet- or goggle-mounted display with image fusion and synthetic vision technologies.
The timing is right to make graphic display cockpits a high priority and jump ahead of traditional plodding. With the current accuracy afforded by the Global Positioning System and concurrent navigation systems and the coming availability of a vast digital terrain database, the highway-in-the-sky visualization concept is even more attainable than back in Hoover's day.
The House Appropriations transportation subcommittee is due to meet this week to discuss airline safety. I can think of no single project that offers more potential for improving airline safety than developing synthetic-vision technology. Do not waste valuable NASA funds and expertise by sinking more money into the alphanumeric cockpit display jungle. Make the leap that will pay off in saved lives in the not-too-far future.
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