Enhancing General Aviation Safety with Synthetic Vision Systems

Dejan Damjanovic and Jens Schiefele

Abstract:	In Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) a 3D flight guidance display depicts environmental data and mission critical information to pilots in order to increase situation awareness. With these systems Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) can be reduced, taxi operation simplified, and navigation abilities significantly enhanced. Such a system consists of four necessary components: 1. Synthetic Vision Display (SVD) 2. Precise and reliable navigation 3. Accurate and reliable databases 4. Certified hardware While the Navigation System has to provide information about current position, attitudes, and sensor integrity, the database provides information for terrain, obstacles, airports and navigation data. While the concepts of Synthetic Vision have been around for quite a number of years, it is only the recent advent of newer multifunction display technology that has enabled practical implementations to be technically and economically feasible. This papers discusses new industrial standards (RTCA/EUROCAE committees) to survey and generate worldwide databases for airports, terrain, and obstacles. Also, a methodology to achieve this goal is given. A review of prototype and production Synthetic Vision Displays (SVD) from Euro Telematik, UPS Advanced Technologies, universal Avionics, VDO-Luftfahrtgerätewerk, and NASA, are discussed. Finally, a NASA-industry cooperation to develop industrial SVS products under the umbrella of the NASA Aviation Safety Program (ASP) is introduced. A key element of the SVS NASA-ASP is the Jeppesen lead task to develop methods for worldwide database generation and certification. Jeppesen will build three example airport databases that will be used in flight trials with NASA test aircraft.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2000 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 26 - 28, 2000 Pacific Hotel Disneyland Anaheim, CA
Pages:	423 - 432
Cite this article:	Damjanovic, Dejan, Schiefele, Jens, "Enhancing General Aviation Safety with Synthetic Vision Systems," Proceedings of the 2000 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Anaheim, CA, January 2000, pp. 423-432.
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