MULTI-MODE RADAR DEVELOPMENT--A QUESTION OF COMPROMISE

Over the past 18 months the Army has been developing a terrain following capability in it’s next generation special operations aircraft (SOA), the MH-60K and the MH-47E. As two experimental test pilots assigned to the Army’s Airworthiness Qualification Test Directorate (AQTD) of the US Army Aviation Technical Test Center, we would like to convey the role that human factors has played in the development of the MMR for terrain following (TF) operations in the SOA. In the MH-60K, the pilot remains the interface between the aircraft, via the flight controls and the processed radar data, and the flight director cues. The presentation of the processed radar data to the pilot significantly affects the overall system performance, and is directly driven by the way humans see, process, and react to stimuli. Our development has been centered around the optimization of this man-machine interface.