A synthetic vision application in integrated modular avionics architecture

Enhanced and synthetic vision applications for flight guidance are on the verge of commercialisation and wide-scale employment. The paper gives an overview of the characteristics and benefits of these types of displays, and focuses on their implementation in an integrated modular avionics environment. The enhanced/synthetic flight guidance display is a promising approach to the solution for the problems of poor visibility low-level flight. It yields a computer-generated three-dimensional cockpit view and can optionally be combined with an imaging sensor (e.g. FLIR, mmWR, LL-TV). The paper will provide details on the technical concept and the evaluation of a functional prototype in flight trials.. After functional validation, a enhanced/ synthetic vision display was chosen to be ESG's first avionics application to be transferred into an integrated modular avionics architecture. The paper addresses the allocation of the functions necessary for the synthetic vision display. It explains how database access, I/O to other systems, numerical calculation and graphics generation are mapped to IMA-based mass memory, data processing and graphics processing components.