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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