Design and evaluation of an air-to-air combat debriefing system using a head-mounted display

The United States Air Force Red Flag exercise is the premier combat flight training experience for fighter pilots. We created and evaluated a computer system for replay of Red Flag air-to-air combat training data with alternative display systems. Air combat data could either be displayed on a console display system (CDS) which mimicked existing replay displays or in a head-mounted display (HMD). The effectiveness of replaying air combat data using these two displays was compared in a human-performance experiment with USAF fighter pilots as the subjects. Quantitative and qualitative data about display performance and preference were collected from the pilots who used each display to review mission replays. Although there was no statistically significant difference between the subject performance when using familiar CDS or the new HMD, there was a trend favoring the HMD.