4D flight guidance displays, a gate to gate solution

Present state of the art flight deck instrumentation does a great deal to enhance safety and efficiency of today's aircraft operations. The challenge to increase air traffic capacity and at the same time improve safety and efficiency significantly will only be met, if future cockpit instruments will guarantee the pilots spatial situation awareness in any phase of flight. The only way to achieve this is synthetic vision. Commercial transport aircraft operate without exception under instrument flight rules (IFR). Therefore regarding flight deck instrumentation a key to assure spatial awareness is the visualization of the spatial environment in a natural way no matter what the actual visibility conditions are. Since computational performance increased rapidly at the end of the eighties and this progress is still going on, this is now possible by means of synthetic vision. Consequently, an experimental synthetic vision system (SVS) was jointly developed by the Darmstadt University of Technology and the VDO Luftfahrtgerate Werk and underwent extensive flight tests in August 1997. A geographical database, a precision navigation system and the 4D flight guidance displays driven by a symbol generator, capable of rendering 3D images, form the three pillars of the synthetic vision system. This paper focuses on the human-machine interface (HMI). The HMI currently consists of two perspective displays complementing one another: the Primary Flight Display (PFD); and the Navigation Display (ND). By providing not only flight guidance but also taxi and traffic information, the two displays support the crew from gate to gate.