No abstract

Airports lose significant capacity during instnunent conditions. Several plans are afoot to expand the nations' airports to achieve sufficient runway spacing for independent IFR approaches. The projected cost of the ten largest projects in the United States is $8 -16 Billion. The ability to conduct Closely Spaced Parallel Approaches (CSPA) in Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC) could reduce the requisite runway separation and significantly lower that national expense. In addition the environmental impact of airport capacity increases would be significantly reduced. This paper presents a synthetic vision display and ~ the supporting flight system to attempt to achieve this goal. The display presents the pilot with the information necessary to aviate, navigate and monitor traflic on the parallel approach. This paper also documents the first series of flight experiments to test the applicability of synthetic vision displays to CSPA Operations (Figure 1).

Using a 3-D perspective display, Stanford University has flown numerous approaches and missed approaches. The system has been flown extensively on a Beechcraft Queen Air in the working air traffic environment. Inflight evaluations included tunnel approaches overlaid on existing non-precision procedures, curved and segmented approaches, traffic patterns flown by inshxment reference, and skywriting with GPS. Augmentations to the perspective flight display, including perspective terrain and dynamic terrain alerting, are viable and improve pilots' situational awareness.

No abstract