Heads Up Display Aircraft

Heads Up Display Aircraft - If any of the augmented-reality HUDs can be made to practically work, that is. Falcon AR has more modest ambitions: a relatively inexpensive technology that adds depth to a head-up display for just the driver. WayRay, by comparison, aims to create a holographic display that can project across the entire front windshield — think navigation information for the driver, Netflix for the passengers — but requires specially bonded layers of windshield glass that add more cost to the overall expense of the

car. The 'applied' benefits of a HUD to transport aircraft flight safety have been seen mainly as the enhancement of situational awareness for flight in limited (or night) visibility in the vicinity of visible terrain, water, ground-based obstacles or other aircraft;

Heads Up Display Aircraft

this is because it is possible to maintain an external lookout without losing access to key aircraft instrumentation. This applies to initial climb after take off but is especially true for the approach and landing phase of flight, which is where the majority of all aircraft accidents - and the majority of fatal Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) accidents to public transport aircraft - occur

The Safety Benefits

. This is where a HUD can visualize for the pilot any 'gap' that may exist between the required aircraft trajectory to a safe landing and a projection of the implications of the current aircraft status by displaying the projected touchdown point.

A HUD - Head Up Display - is a means of presenting information to the pilot in the line of their external forward vision which projects key flight instrument data onto a small 'see-through' screen positioned just in front of the pilot's line of sight looking

ahead out of the aircraft. Despite what you might think based on Iron Man or Star Wars, layering information is only "futuristic" if you ignore the incremental practical progression from gun sights (raised tabs of metal that, when aligned, show that a straight barrel sits more or less on

a ray from the bullet to the target) to reticles (crosshairs or sights) to simulated horizon lines or projected radar displays, which, during the multinational innovation laboratory of a global conflict, progressed pretty damn quickly. (Am I saying that gun sights were the first augmented-reality technology? Well, I’m not not saying it.)

Flying With The Hud

Enter the latest option from Grand Rapids Technologies (GRT), one of the first EFIS manufacturers in the experimental world. Selling a full line of EFIS options from simple to complex (including large touchscreens), GRT has pioneered many features along the way.

A few years ago, Greg Toman, founder of the company, played around with an Android phone connected via Bluetooth to the EFIS screen. This wireless extra screen could then be mounted in the back seat of a tandem aircraft to give the GIB some flight data.

And sure, several inexpensive HUD options have shown up at the major aviation shows in the last few years, but they have been devoid of useful information, hard to see in daylight, and not very satisfying when it comes to overall usefulness.

In the meantime, the GRT HUD is a great step into the world of affordable heads-up displays for the experimental world. We predict that more of these types of units will become available in the near future because once someone figures it out, others will follow.

Hud Content

A rising tide floats all boats—or in this case, rising air supports all aircraft—and we look forward to a bright future where panels become secondary, and pilots can simply look out the window. If you're distracted while driving, it's difficult to shoot your enemy.

During World War II — a notoriously distracting period in human history — this profound observation provoked the development of a variety of largely mechanical user aids that we now categorize as "head-up displays" (HUDs): effectively transparent information displays that allowed fighter and

bomber pilots to keep their attention on the actual horizon, not the gauges or handheld maps inside the cockpit, the better to put bullets into enemies or bombs on top of their war stuff. An Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) study, (see Further Reading) looked at 1079 civil jet transport accidents which occurred between 1959 and 1989, before HUDs were prevalent.

It concluded that if a HUD had been fitted and operated by properly trained flight crew, it might have prevented or positively influenced 33% of total loss accidents and 29% of 'major partial loss' accidents. The FSF Approach-and-Landing Accident Reduction (ALAR) Task Force recommended that both airlines and business-jet operators install HUDs that display angle of attack and airspeed trend data to improve flight crew awareness of the energy state of their aircraft (see Further Reading

Lower Approach Minima

). The current Global Aviation Safety Road Map includes HUD in the recommendations for better use of technology to enhance safety of aircraft operations during approach and landing. A head-up display gives pilots access to the critical flight information needed to safely fly the aircraft while allowing them to focus their attention outside the cockpit for potential conflicts or threats.

Illustration by Bryan Christie Design Thinking about it, we realized that GRT had set everything up for us with the PC connected to their USB adapter, not the one in our airplane, so somehow, we were going to have to get it to look for the new adapter.

Fortunately, this isn't very hard; all you need is a USB mouse. You plug that into the “Host” port on the mini PC, and suddenly you get a cursor. A right click of the mouse button brings up a menu screen, and from there it was a short bit of trial and error to find the BT setup page.

From there it was obvious, and when we went back to the HUD display, we were looking at data mirrored from the EFIS PFD. Perfect! Heads Up Technologies teams with our clients to achieve the vision of a better experience for both pilots and passengers.

Into The Future

Our culture of ingenuity, and our desire to say yes, are backed by our decades of know-how and breakthrough achievements in lighting systems, flight deck safety and CMS/IFE. The attachment of an LCD image source to the combiner glass instead of using CRT projection was originally aimed at saving weight by using technology similar to that employed in a digital media projector, which also requires a lower voltage power supply or run 'hot'.

This alternative image generation process has now been embraced by both Airbus (A340-600) and Boeing (B787) as well as Embraer (ERJ 190). The LCD method is able to provide a wider field of view than CRT;

this should enable the pilot to see information properly in stronger crosswinds and more easily manage approach angle and energy during circling and other non-standard approaches. It is also considered likely to increase overall system reliability and produce both sharper pictures and generally improved gray-shade presentation in bright ambient light.

However it shakes out, the problem of keeping a driver's eyes scanning the real world, not a screen, will continue to be solved by attempting to put a different type of screen in front of drivers.

Hud Technical Developments

And as cars increasingly are packed with sensors like RADAR and LIDAR, as well as machine-learning-edumacated cameras, there is a real opportunity to increase drivers' awareness of hazards in their field of view: kids on bikes, potholes, high-calorie

milkshakes. Cars already attempt to be aware of these hazards so that the safety systems, like lane-keeping or automatic emergency braking, can operate. Guidance is provided with a velocity vector circle, showing exactly where the aircraft is going (not just where it is pointed), and it is paired with a guidance circle, which shows where you need to point the velocity vector to make the airplane go to

the destination. This is exactly the same symbology that we had in the Space Shuttle—if you want to feel like an astronaut—and it works very well. Just pitch and roll to capture the guidance symbol, and you're on your way.

These days, almost every luxury car brand offers at least an optional head-up display that does pretty much the same thing: reflect some information from a small TFT panel onto the windshield, usually something similar to what is shown on the instrument cluster display —

Advanced Features

speed, GPS-guided turn-by-turn directions, maybe what song is streaming through Spotify. (This rebooted Lincoln Navigator's head-up display is a good example — large, elegantly kerned, art directed with restraint.) Older HUDs use cathode ray tubes to project the operational data but are quickly being traded for LCD light sources.

CRT projectors are much heavier and do not produce images nearly as sharp as those from an LCD. Installing a Hudly in an airplane already equipped with a GRT EFIS is simple, and with an inexpensive Bluetooth dongle plugged into one of the display's USB ports, you can wirelessly connect to either an inexpensive Android phone, or an even less expensive (about $50)

stick PC—a PC shaped like a thumb drive, but maybe twice as large (which is still quite small). The price of the Hudly? We recently looked on their website, and you get the unit, combiner, and cables for $299.

GRT charges $150 for the software, you buy the Android or stick PC, and for less than $500, you have a HUD! Like aircraft, not all HUDs are created equal. One difference relates to field of view, essentially how wide left or right the flying pilot can see the outside world through the combiner glass.

Because aircraft don't always fly where the nose is pointed, a wider field of view allows the HUD to accurately project data at the edges of the display in strong crosswinds. The lateral field of view can vary from 15 degrees to as much as 21 degrees either side of the nose.

Vertically, it ranges from 24 to 30 degrees. Volumetric HUDs, like those from Falcon AR or competitors like WayRay, will allow something like true augmented reality to not just project flat information in front of a driver's face, but can position little overlays — lane markers, or GPS arrows — such that they appear

to be floating in the real world. A tiny, flat arrow that indicates a left turn is handy, but your phone or touchscreen center-stack display can already do that, if you glance down or ask. A 3-D arrow that curves in front of you to show exactly where the next intersection is in real life is much more handy.

The HUD can also display the highway-in-the-sky boxes generated for approaches by the GRT EFIS and runway outlines that you can follow to the ground. Because the HUD field of view is not as wide as the view on an EFIS or out the window, the velocity vector can become display limited (off the edge of the display so to speak), and with a significant crab angle, so will the

runway. This is a limitation common to most HUDs that are not specifically designed for a wide field of view. At the beginning of World War II, airplane armament was aimed using reflector sights and gyroscopically stabilized reticles that could "lead" a target — clever stuff, but not hugely advanced over technology used during the previous World War.

By the end of WWII, some bombers had onboard microwave radar systems with television-based displays, although only a select number of specialized night flyers, like the zippy wooden-framed de Havilland Mosquito, were equipped with what we would consider to be a true

HUD, which reflected the radar information, including an artificial horizon, onto a piece of glass just in front of the pilot controls. Not surprisingly, military applications have led the way but following the introduction of the first civil HUD application in 1993, both general aviation and airline applications have been growing and nowadays, all of the latest multi crew aircraft types have HUD system options.

HUD on multi-crew civil aircraft has been limited to single-side installation with only the Boeing C-17 and Lockheed C130J military transports having completely independent dual installations. Now, however, customer demand has driven the development of a dual LCD head-up guidance system for the Embraer 190. All the major avionic manufacturers who originally developed equipment for the military market are now also supplying the civil market.

There are some alternative names for a HUD, including VGS - Visual Guidance System, HGS - Head Up Guidance System, and HFDS - Head-up Flight Display System. This year, Toman took things a step further, reaching into the consumer electronics bin one more time and coming up with the Hudly—a heads-up display designed for the automotive market.

The Hudly consists of a small projector module and a glass combiner that mounts to the windshield and is capable of displaying speed and navigation data generated by—you guessed it—an Android phone. It can even connect into the car's ODB-II data port to display faults and other system information.

But forget about that—we're talking airplanes here. The magic thing is that Android phone bit, which Toman had already figured out. An affordable heads-up display (HUD) has been the Holy Grail of avionics equipment for the experimental world for a long time.

As panel-mounted EFIS displays have gone from simple, low-res LCDs to massive touchscreens, every pilot who has had to glance up and down between windscreen and panel on an instrument approach has dreamed of having all of the necessary information for flight in their

line of vision while looking out the windscreen. Sure, HUDs have been around in military and commercial aircraft for many years now—but the prices have been eye-watering and not particularly friendly to install and hook up.

Designers at General Motors were at least sketching out the idea of ​​putting a HUD in a vehicle by 1965, during the conceptualization for the Mako Shark II, a concept car that informed the curves of the late-'60s, early-'70s C3 Chevrolet

Corvette. (The fiberglass-body one, stereotypically driven by pricks in period movies, but also astronauts and half the population of the mid-century Midwest. They're beautiful cars, and readily available for purchase at a reasonable price even today, since Chevy sold

zillions of them, and they look faster than they actually drive.) However, the HUD never made it off the page into any Mako Shark II concept car that was actually built. A HUD projector sends critical flight, navigation and aircraft energy-management data to a glass screen, called a combiner, hanging at eye level between the pilot and the windshield.

As the pilot peers through the combiner glass, he or she can view the outside world and also see airspeed, altitude, heading, course, and flight-path guidance symbology on the screen. HUD was used early on as an alternative manual flying means of conducting Instrument Landing System (ILS) Cat 3a auto land in low visibility mainly because of lower system maintenance costs and better reliability than the 'traditional' autoland system.

It also enabled these low visibility approaches to be made to runways without the usual ground equipment and redundancy needed to support ILS approaches in these conditions. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Certification is also now selectively given to EVS HUD systems to use lower minima than published for both straight-in approaches using both Cat 1 Instrument Landing System (ILS) and Non-Precision Approaches flown using the procedures for a Continuous

Descent Final Approach (CDFA). Both are able to use a DH of 100ft above reference threshold elevation before the standard acquisition of visual reference is required. A heads-up display is a useful addition to any aircraft operation where going back and forth from outside view to the panel is necessary and can lead to time delays and confusion.

No, in most cases, you don't need one, but it can make certain tasks easier and more intuitive. As we write this, technology is advancing, and Hudly is developing a wireless unit of their own, one that presumably incorporates the mini PC in one package, so it connects directly with the EFIS (via Bluetooth) and eliminates the nest of wiring and adapters

in the cockpit. This would be nice, and we'll see if it happens. So that's the head-up display, completely sorted in the early '40s: Take some hopefully useful information from some electronics, project it onto some glass, keep your hands on ten and two, try not to put your machine where any bullets are,

and hopefully get your airframe safely back home. And while postwar engineers continued to develop the HUD for the burgeoning commercial aircraft market, it didn't take too long before automakers — staffed by many veterans themselves — began to see the utility of a HUD in a car, albeit at an abbreviated pace.

ARINC 764 issued in 2005 is the technical standard for HUD avionics. It describes the physical form factors, fit dimensions, electrical interface definition and typical HUD functions. HUD technical development is focused in two areas: the first is the integration of Enhanced Vision System (EVS) and maybe Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) (SVS) functionality;

the second, with smaller aircraft such as the VLJ in mind, are alternatives to the CRT image projection system. After rollout, the display will even tell you how much runway you have used—an interesting number that pilots rarely see.

I have noticed already that the more I see it, the more I am storing this distance in my head, and this can be quite useful when looking at going into shorter runways. The HUD projector attached to the ceiling above the pilot contains a backlighted liquid-crystal display as the light source to aim the flight data at the combiner screen.

The LCD aims the information forward, focusing it through a series of multiple relay lenses aligned nonsymmetrically. As the light hits the combiner glass, the rays of light are forced to align themselves in parallel rows to an infinite point in space, a little trick that prevents the pilot from needing to refocus his eyes as he peers through the screen.

That alignment of the light is referred to as collimation. Another feature incorporated in the GRT HUD is a new project of Toman's: Runway Overrun/Low Approach Protection (ROLAP). By telling the HUD software a few performance features of the airplane (stall speed, landing configuration glide angle, and rollout distance), the software can calculate a "runway required display," showing a graphic interpretation of where you will be on the runway at

touchdown and indicating if you will have enough runway remaining to safely come to a stop after touchdown. In addition, it will monitor approach angle and alert if you are below the normal glide path for the aircraft—in other words, a low approach.

Even the best automotive HUDs are limited by a simple technical limitation: They can only project a two-dimensional image into the field of view of a driver. You may be able to fiddle with a dial or change exactly where the ghostly pane floats in your view, but a two-dimensional display can only ever look like a translucent tablet screen superimposed over the real world.

best aftermarket heads up display, heads up display hud, fighter jet heads up display, car head up display kit, what is head up display, head up display ksa, hud airplane, aircraft hud