Terrain awareness & pathway guidance for head-up displays (tapguide); a simulator study of pilot performance

This study was conducted to determine the flight technical performance, workload, and situation awareness of pilots flying a low-level curved approach to an austere airfield. This low-level ingress was flown under simulated night IMC with occasional breakouts into VMC. A total of 13 USAF pilots participated in this study. The simulated flights were performed in AFRL´s Transport Aircraft Cockpit(TRAC) flight simulator. The simulator was configured using a C-17 aeromodel, and the head-up display showed either conventional commercial symbology (baseline) or one of two synthetic vision pathway configurations with wire-frame terrain. One of the synthetic vision configurations used rectangular pathway elements (pavers) and the other configuration used a square wire-frame tunnel. Speed and altitude information was provided either in the form of tapes or dials in all three configurations. A secondary task was introduced to test the displays under increased levels of workload. The secondary task involved authentication of a 5-digit code. In addition, the pilots had to deal with traffic targets to which they were alerted on the head-down display. The flight technical data clearly indicated that both pathway formats(paver and tunnel) are superior to the baseline symbology format. For all practical purposes the paver and tunnel formats performed equally well. Head-up guidance with terrain and pathway information provided much tighter flight technical performance than conventional head-up guidance. Thus, we conclude that the mission capability of the potential military users could be substantially increased.