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We have designed a visual flight guidance system that enables manual control of aircraft operations in degraded visual environments down to Cat III, both for take-off and landing. This has been achieved by means of visual guidance cues displayed on a head up display (HUD) and whereas this is not in itself novel, our development methods and approach to verifying its operation we believe are. In order to certify the system as airworthy, compliance with the relevant airworthiness standards defined in 14 CFR part 21 and other related guidance material, needs to be demonstrated. Demonstrating compliance by actually flying the aircraft a statistically appropriate number of times is prohibitively expensive. The challenge in this case was to harmonize existing flight guidance algorithms with a faithful aero model of a new airframe and to demonstrate their effectiveness in a manner that was economically viable. To achieve this, we constructed a Digital Simulation and Verification Environment (DSVE) that hosted a Digital Twin (DT) of the system such that its operation in real conditions could be accurately predicted.
Paul Wisely's paper is being published without an associated oral presentation because he passed away on 18 March, 2021 after a long illness. Paul Wisely was a member of SPIE since 2006 and a senior member since 2011. He won SPIE's "Best Paper" award two years running, 2009 and 2010, for papers presented to the Display Technologies and Applications for Defense, Security, and Avionics III & IV conferences. Paul will be sadly missed by the many SPIE colleagues who knew him.
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