VISUAL AUGMENTATION FOR NIGHT FLIGHT OVER FEATURELESS TERRAIN

Night Vision Goggles (NVGs) allow pilots to perform low altitude night missions. However, pilots report many problems when flying by NVGs in regions with relatively featureless terrains, such as over the desert or water: horizons are often invisible, or false horizons occur, stars, ground lights, and lights from other aircraft may be confused, and distortions in perceived altitude, speed, and terrain slope can occur. One possible way of mitigating these problems is to augment the visual scene with infrared cueing lights which project from the aircraft to the terrain. The effectiveness of several cueing light configurations was evaluated in a series of simulation studies. The more successful configurations were those that provided the pilots with a pseudo-flight director. Within this class, the configuration with two spatial-temporal sampling clusters was preferred.