Advanced Vision Cueing and Control (AVC2)

Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) and approach-and-landing accidents (ALAs) are the leading causes of aircraft accidents and fatalities. Advanced Vision Cueing and Control (AVC²) systems tackle both these problems by dealing with two major factors: pilot workload and situation awareness. AVC² significantly increases safety and operational flexibility for space, aircraft, and land vehicles that operate in low- or no-visibility conditions, virtually eliminating the worst accident categories. The all-condition visibility provided by AVC² facilitates approach, landing, and taxi maneuvers, allowing normal operations under conditions that now dramatically slow or even halt activity. AVC² affords an opportunity to use windowless cockpits for space, air, or ground vehicles in the future.

AVC² systems are made up of three primary components:

	Synthetic Vision presents a 3D representation of the outside world. The computer-generated terrain imagery is created from on-board databases and precise position and navigational information. Depending on task, the operator can choose to see the representation in 3D perspective, plainview, or vertical profile. Synthetic Vision eliminates poor visibility as a hazard and enhances a vehicle's operational capabilities.
	Enhanced Vision, already flying with infrared augmentation, offers excellent night visibility, improving maneuvering accuracy and situation awareness. For the future, millimeter wave capability promises even higher image quality and weather/smoke penetration.
	Advanced Symbology employs a visual vocabulary and display format that integrates information from all available sources. It presents information to the pilot in ways that require less work to understand and process, improve pilot tracking performance, and increase situation awareness. This display methodology simplifies instrument flight by replicating cues basic to visual flight--including representations of outside relationships--and integrating these cues with navigation and flight instrument information, such as the flight path vector and conformal runways.

By exploiting immediately understood relationships and cues, Advanced Symbology establishes temporal and spatial relationships for the pilot/vehicle operator without the need for conscious decision. For instance, Advanced Symbology replicates the texture, perspective and color cues used to judge movement and distance visually sky and ground shading, texturing and perspective lines, and the expanded field-of-view critical for a sense of directional movement.

Honeywell has led the way in setting standards and providing technologies for air, land, sea, and space transportation and navigation systems worldwide. This leadership comes not only from the sophistication of our technologies, but is also due in large part to Honeywell's emphasis on safety. If advanced technology is not applied properly, it results in awkward, confusing, and hard-to-use systems. Honeywell recognizes that safety and efficiency improvements of any new avionics design may only be realized to their fullest by implementing a disciplined human-centered design approach. This approach enables us to produce innovative, integrated cockpit design solutions that not only increase safety and efficiency, but also minimize user training, operational errors, and workload.

Honeywell's demonstrated ability to seamlessly integrate multiple sources of information from onboard sensors and databases (including EGPWS, navigational, geopolitical, obstacle and charts) is critical to our ability to provide the best user interface for current and future pilot and operational needs. Our most recently certified Primus Epic® display is the "most advanced in the industry for the degree of fused information" (June 2, 2003 AWST article). Honeywell has built an extensive intellectual property portfolio for optimal pilot interface formats for the integrated flight deck including data fusion, visual momentum techniques, and efficient algorithms for real-time image generation.

Honeywell's new, integrated avionics systems provide an opportunity to fuse information from multiple sources into one display. "A big part of seeing the big picture when you are in the approach environment is the perspective view of the terrain," says Honeywell Test Pilot Sandy Wyatt. "But equally important to the terrain rendition of AVC² are the advanced symbology elements like the flight path vector and conformal runway that were previously only available on a HUD-equipped aircraft. The large-format LCDs provide the necessary space to merge the rendered terrain and advanced symbology in a way that enhances the pilot's performance in flight path and energy management and greatly improved situation awareness."

A large, landscaped display can provide several operational advantages to the workstation when compared to a square porthole into which the same information must be squeezed. In human factors evaluations of the large landscaped displays, observed the potential to reduce task completion time, reduce input errors, increase situation awareness and produce an overall reduction in pilot workload.

The most critical area for efficient use of flight deck space is directly in front of the operator and about 15 degrees down from horizontal, where resting vision tends to fall. Using larger landscaped displays within this forward panel area can minimize the amount of space consumed by bezels with respect to the amount of space provided for the usable, visible display area. Large, landscape displays tend to conform to the rectangular shape of most forward panels in aircraft and the wide format of the human visual field. In addition, the large landscape format displays approximate the human aesthetic preference for what the ancient Greeks referred to as the Golden Rectangle - the perfect, harmonious, and beautifully proportioned shape.

In a full screen format, map graphics (such as flight plan data, terrain, traffic, airspace, navigation aids, and weather) on a large landscape display can provide unsurpassed situation awareness capabilities. While traditional air traffic controller workstations have always been designed with the recognition that large formats are required for traffic and weather situational awareness, future collaborative decision making environments will make it important to provide that same level of awareness to crewmembers and other operators.

The AVC² primary flight display concept has recently completed a series of human factors pilot evaluations in a company-sponsored flight test program. The study provided very strong pilot acceptance and usability of the AVC² concept. Study participants reported that the synthetic terrain was very visible and useable in all lighting conditions and the advanced symbology was a great aid to pilot performance and workload. The successful completion of this series of flight tests put Honeywell on track to provide human-centered next generation display formats for many of its new large-format LCD display customers. A cross-functional team of human factors scientists, test pilots, software, system, and display engineer continues to refine and develop AVC² using the Honeywell human-centered systems development process.