Evaluating a Helicopter Pilot HMI for Rotor Strike Warning in a Simulated Environment

Abstract

Helicopter pilots often encounter unknown situations especially while in tactical flight or during rescue missions where they are demanded to react adequately to occurring hazards. This requires the pilots to continuously monitor their systems as well as their environment particularly in confined areas where there are numerous obstacles reducing free space for helicopter maneuvers. In those environments, pilots need to have very precise knowledge about the position and, if somehow possible, the shape of obstacles around them to be able to avoid accidents. Existing assistance systems only marginally support the pilot in this task. The R&D project “Human-Machine Interface (HMI) for Rotor Strike Warning & Hostile Fire Indication” conducted partially at our institute aims to improve those shortcomings by offering the pilots additional information. The project’s goal is to design an HMI that is intuitively and efficiently usable by helicopter pilots. It uses aural as well as visual transmission of the required information. The paper describes this HMI concept as well as our helicopter simulator used for its verification. Additionally, based on the simulation environment VBS3 that is used in our simulator it explains which steps are necessary to provide the data required for the HMI concept evaluation. The paper concludes with an explanation of some possibilities for improvement, which are partly already planned for implementation.