Evaluation of Pilot Assistance Systems for Helicopter Ship Deck Landing

The operation of helicopters on ships is one to most challenging tasks due to adverse weather conditions, the lack of visible cues, turbulent airwakes behind the ship and a moving confined landing spot on the ship. Currently, only a very limited number of pilot assistance systems are available to ease helicopter ship deck landings. The focus of this paper is the evaluation of a Head-Down Display (HDD), a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and two different Attitude Command Attitude Hold (ACAH) flight control architectures for ship deck landings based on piloted simulation. A ship deck landing scenario at the research flight simulation facility Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES) has been extended to include turbulent ship airwakes from high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The pilot assistance systems have been implemented at the simulator and evaluated by four helicopter pilots. In particular, the results show a favorable potential of the Head-Mounted Display and the flight control architectures.