Mercury Computer to Develop Synthetic Vision for "Brownout" Landings

BAE Systems Australia has awarded Mercury Computer Systems a contract to provide a flight-ready prototype synthetic vision display to help helicopter pilots "see" their landing site during so-called brownout landings.

Brownouts can occur when a rotorcraft attempts to land on dusty terrain.  When descending through the last 50 feet of any landing the downwash created by a helicopter's rotors pick up the dust on the ground, which in some instances can reduce the pilot's visibility to zero.  Dozens of helicopter accidents have been attributed to brownout landing accidents, in both civilian and military operations.  In 2002, the president of the American Helicopter Society said brownout landings was the most critical safety issue facing rotorcraft.

This situation has caused civil and government groups around the world to began exploring how new sensors could be used to solve the problem, and synthetic vision was one promising technology that is now being seriously developed.  The Air Force Research Lab coined the phase "see and remember," to describe a system that scans the landing area before the rotors kick up the dust, and feeds the data into a computer that "remembers" where the terrain is, and then depicts the image in three dimensions on a cockpit-mounted monitor for the pilot to use in brownout conditions.

Mercury has developed a patent-pending Morphing Terrain Engine that incorporates terrain sensor measurements that are captured and updated in real time via a standard interface, and displayed synthetically to give a pilot a visual depiction of the outside world in an intuitive format.  Mercury Computer Systems has a video on its Website that shows an example of this.   03-02-2007.

Click here to become a registered Flt Tech Online subscriber and receive headlines delivered to your e-mail each week

Click here to go back to the headlines