Improved Operational Reliability and Safety with HUD - The Alaska Airlines Experience

This paper relates the experience of Alaska Airlines in the acquisition and operation of the Heads Up Display (HUD) on it's fleet of 23 Boeing 727-200 aircraft. The airline has accrued more than five years of successful experience with the system since it's first installation in late 1987. In using this system for approaches to Category IIIa (Cat IIIa) weather minimums, Alaska differs from most prior HUD users in that the approaches are flown and landed manually, as opposed to the more common use of the HUD to monitor the autopilot during a coupled, autoland approach.