1 Civil Aviation Simulation Visual Regulation Review Richard Flitton 06 Mar 2001.
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Civil Aviation Simulation Visual Regulation Review
Richard Flitton
06 Mar 2001
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Industry Call to Action
• RAeS Conference May 2000 highlighted the need for change
• FAA (Paul Ray)
– An increase in the numbers of ab initio pilots and more congested air space calls for better training fidelity
– Current simulators lack the fidelity to train for all required tasks
– Grand father rights may not be appropriate for sound, motion and visual systems in the future
• IATA FSWG (Capt Donald Van Dyke)– World jet fleet is expected to double by 2018
– Required pilot entry level experience may be reduced
– CFIT, loss of control & weather related events are not currently trained for
– Training & checking requirements have not kept pace with these changes
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Need for increased visual standards?• IATA
– Improved pixel resolution + texture sharpness
– Enhanced scene correlation & fidelity• Terrain fidelity
• More complex visually apparent weather, correlated with cockpit instruments
• Runway visual surface conditions correlated with motion
• More Air and ground traffic
– Larger fields of view – fill the cockpit windows
• FAA– Fully accurate airport models
– Increased environmental simulation
– Increased fields of viewRequest for international review of visual (and motion) standards
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Existing Visual RegulationsVisual regulations currently fall into three broad categories• Measurable tests
– Displays: FOV, contrast ratio, brightness, resolution etc– IG: Transport delay, occultation etc
• Demonstration tests– Runway definition at set distances– Attitude correlation– Visibility calibration
• Subjective assessment– Visual scene content– Weather effects
This last group is the most difficult to define common standards for
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Legacy Visual Scene Content • Wide variety in visual scenes in training use today
• Many legacy systems with inferior rendering technology
– Limited processing capacity
– Inferior texture schemes
– Low screen resolution
– Poor anti-aliasing schemes
– Limited weather effects
– Limited terrain fidelity & extent
– Minimal airport content
• Obsolescence is becoming an issue for many legacy systems
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Present Day Visual Content• Improvements in all areas – but still difficult to quantify
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Visual scene accuracy is increasingly important• New procedures such as GNSS approaches, requires airport databases to be
geo-referenced to precise absolute positions. • WGS84 geo-referencing is required to be GNSS compliant. • The simulator integration of Terrain Awareness Warning Systems (TAWS)
requires terrain and obstacle information in the vicinity of the aerodrome.• For realistic training, all geo-spatial information stored within each
individual aircraft system (e.g.,TAWS, FMS, ND, etc.) will have to match the database stored in the simulator’s visual database.
• RTCA SC-193 and EUROCAE WG-44 are producing international Aerodrome & Terrain Mapping standards to this end– Fidelity demanded by this effort currently far outstrips available source data
and IG processing capacity. – Real-time portrayal of this data could be many years away
• What will be available in the next few years ?
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Tomorrow’s Content• Visual systems around the corner will include dramatic
improvements– Terrain fidelity – greater than EPGWS currently implements– Large amounts of photo- derived imagery– Extended weather effects– Very large areas
• Scene creation tools coupled with IG processing power will enable very detailed airports to be built
– All airport buildings & 3D signage– All runway & taxiways including 3D profiles– Large numbers of dynamic 3D objects– Active scenes with embedded environment dynamics
• Very high image quality– Very sophisticated anti-aliasing techniques– High pixel resolutions
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Tomorrows Civil Content - Drawn from Military Technology
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Tomorrows Civil Terrain Fidelity
Salt Lake City – 100m terrain grid
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Tomorrow’s Displays
• Military systems in use today are a guide to our future
• Potential for very bright and high screen resolution (10M pixel + ) laser projectors (overcome dynamic range problems of LCDs)
– Will require radically different IG design - and may be cost prohibitive
• Larger collimated fields of view for multi-pilot systems may be difficult to achieve due to physical and cost constraints
Increasing display regulations may add cost to the user
– Variable resolution & pixel cannon dome displays create eye-limiting images with large fields of view – but at a price
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Tomorrow’s Visual Regulation Needs
• Current visual regulation criteria that are measurable and demonstrable will likely be adequate for tomorrow– If it isn't broke, don’t fix it !
• Visual scene content assessment needs to be based upon less subjective criteria
• We need better definition criteria for:– Terrain fidelity
– 3D obstructions & dynamic objects
– Airport content
– Weather portrayal
• Training credits may need to be linked to improved scene fidelity to provide operator incentive
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Suggested Terrain Fidelity Criteria• Terrain fidelity should be assessed based upon areas of interest
• Operator should to provide data references used to construct DBs.
• IG based tools could be used to spot check terrain fidelity
• Databases that met these requirement could be used for advanced training
• EPGWS / CFIT avoidance
• Zero flight airport recognition, familiarity and navigation check-off
• Advanced ATC procedures
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Airport Content Criteria Definition• Airport content should be described in terms of the features required to achieve
a given training task, not the processing capacity of the IG in question
• Describing the required content within the simulator regulations would likely make these documents unnecessarily cumbersome
Proposal: Advanced aviation databases should adhere to a separate internationally agreed standard:
Create an agreed Civil Aviation Visual Scene Content Specification
– This document could be used to define database content standards
– Each advanced database would be required to be approved separately– Standards would define:
• Data, accuracy and revision tracking requirements
• Scene content requirement
• Verification requirements
• Industry Groups (RAeS and IATA) could co-chair standard definition
• Liaise with RTCA / EUROCAE to ensure commonality of objectives
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Conclusion• Current training needs are beyond current visual system
simulator regulations
• Advances in aircraft systems and future traffic growth demand improved visual databases and common content standards.
• Planned aviation industry airport mapping standards are not likely to result solutions for civil simulation in the near /mid term
• Regulations should be updated to reflect improved terrain fidelity that can be specified and measured
• Airport content is impractical to quantify within the regulation documents
• The simulation industry should work towards separate international standards for advanced visual scene content that can be referenced by the existing regulations
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