New Instrumentation Concepts for Manned Flight

The advent of modern aircraft has forced the recognition of three fundamental principles required to optimize human flight control: The first, kinalog attitude display, is an adaptive kinesthetic analog tracing the human orientation as g force is sensed, intended to inhibit the onset of vertigo through the maintenance of continued agreement between the instruments and the human operator's internal "up" vector. The second, anticipatory display, describes information relative to some aspect of a future status of the vehicle, thus overcoming both the pilot's and the vehicle's response time lag. The speed of modern aircraft already leaves too little time for decision making. Anticipatory display may overcome this problem and significantly improve performance. The third, modified pictorial display, presents an integrated pictorial view from which has been removed much of the irrelevant data which would be seen in the real world. These concepts are embodied in proposed aircraft instrument designs which fall within the present state of the art. They are also extended to possible future spacecraft applications. Compatible quantitative instrumentation is also described to complete the cockpit panel. Cursory evaluation has been accomplished by ground simulation and some relevant data is presented. These initial experiments appear to offer a significant promise to increase the performance capability of future manned vehicles.