Contribution of TopOwl~® Head Mounted Display System in Degraded Visual Environments

摘要

Piloting a rotorcraft in a Degraded Visual Environment (DVE) is a very complex task, and the evolution of the rotorcraft missions tend to augment the probability of such degraded flight conditions (increase of night flights, all-weather flights, with brownout or whiteout phenomena…). When the direct view of the external situation is degraded, the avionic system can be of great help for the crew to recover the lost visual references. TopOwl~® Head Mounted Sight and Display (HMSD) system is particularly adapted to such situations, allowing the pilot to remain "eyes-out" while visualizing on a large field of view different information: a conformal enhanced image (EVS) coming from an on-board sensor, various 2D and 3D symbologies (flight, navigation, mission specific symbols), a conformal synthetic representation of the terrain (SVS), a night vision image coming from the integrated Image Intensifier Tubes, or a combination of these data, depending on the external conditions and the phase of flight, according to the pilot's choice.