COMANCHE WARNING, CAUTION, ADVISORY SYSTEM – A “DISPLAY BY EXCEPTION” COCKPIT PHILOSOPHY

Traditional Warning, Caution and Advisory cockpit alerting systems lack the dimension of anticipating the pilots’ informational needs in a variety of mission situations. The Boeing-Sikorsky team has designed a Warning, Caution, Advisory system that has access too much more information about the state of the aircraft than traditional systems. Embedded logic takes into account the internal state of the aircraft systems, as well as the external state of the aircraft in it’s environment and then presents this information to the crew to achieve a pilot vehicle interface alerting system that is based upon expected results. The Comanche Alerting system deduces the answer to enable the pilot to make a timely decision and react. Conventional systems merely present pieces of information through a variety of indications, often scattered throughout the cockpit. Comanche’s alerting system consolidates individual system faults and failures by the use of “overcome by events” display logic, and presents the pilots’ with the highest priority failure by filtering out information irrelevant to the pilot’s decision process. Additionally, once the pilot is presented with the alert, he/she can immediately obtain more specific, lower level information about the anomaly by linking directly from the alert to a system status display. This paper presents an overview of the Comanche Warning, Caution, Advisory system alerting design philosophy and lessons learned based upon initial ground and flight tests with the Mission Equipment Package.