Avionics News December 2016 - 18
HEADS UP IN THE COCKPIT
Continued from page 17
combat in 1918 on German fighters, the reflector sight
won acceptance around the world for fighter and bomber
aircraft.
Basically, the reflector sight components included a
45-degree angle glass light-beam splitter mounted ahead
of the glareshield that projected an illuminated image of
an aiming reticle - an aiming point that appeared to sit
out at infinity in front of the pilot's field of view. It was
perfectly aligned with the plane's guns.
The optical nature of the reflector sight made it
possible to add more information into the field of
view, such as modifications of the aiming point due to
shooting deflection angle as calculated from input of
a gyroscope. That bought the birth of the gyroscopicenhanced reflector sight.
Introduced by the Royal Air Force in 1941, the
original version of the gyroscopic-enhanced optical sight
helped pilots lead their targets while also allowing for
bullet drop during the projectile's flight.
By the end of World War II, the gyroscopic-enhanced
optical sight had become a highly sophisticated device
informed by two gyros and with a self-adjusting reticle
to make more accurate the aiming point of the fighter
using it.
The HUD grew out of work on efforts to project
flight-data information in much the same way - through
a combiner, at the eye's natural infinity focus point.
Course, heading, horizon, directional gyro, altitude
and airspeed were the original data to populate a HUD.
Over time, avionics makers found ways to add more
navigation and other data to the HUD display.
The goal: to make accessible to the pilot critical flight
information without looking down at the instrument
panel or cockpit pedestal. The idea was for the pilot to
see and interpret this important information without ever
taking eyes off the sky.
HUDs and HGS systems 25 years ago started making
the transition from military and commercial-airline
cockpits to business-turbine aircraft; Airbus Corporate
Jets, Boeing Business Jets, Bombardier, Gulfstream
and Dassault with its Falcon family, were among the
earliest to benefit from the trickle-down avionics-options
growth.
Rockwell Collins HGS was among the earliest adapted
by commercial carriers, with Air Alaska buying in
for much of its fleet back in 1990; the system helped
dramatically improve the carrier's on-time performance
18
avionics news
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december
2016
at fog-plagued Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Carriers quickly realized the benefits of these eyelevel instrumentation packages, but it was a few years
later before HUD and HGS technologies worked their
way into business-aircraft cockpits.
And even then, the aircraft able to benefit from this
technology were all at the upper end of the size scale.
System-components sizes precluded most businessturbine aircraft from even approaching an attempt to win
an STC.
The size of components limited HUD systems to those
aircraft large enough to accommodate the components
- Part 25 aircraft, by and large, and those at the upper
reaches of the fleet.
But in the past few years, newer, smaller solutions
have opened the door to HUD and HGS in smaller Part
23 aircraft.
New ways to provide the light at
the end of the vision tunnel
The earliest HUD systems consisted of a projection unit
with an optical collimator package, which consists of a
convex lens or mirror with a cathode ray tube or lightemitting diode, or liquid-crystal display at the focal point.
The package worked together to produce an image where
the light is collimated - or focused. The addition of the
image sources - the CRT, LED or LCD - took the product
of the 1940s-era gyroscopic-enhanced reflector sight to a
new level, while still producing an image where the light
is collimated; the focal point is perceived to be at infinity.
Jet cockpits smaller than medium jets simply lacked the
room and, in particular, overhead space to accommodate
the projection unit, and, equally problematic, a suitable
place for placement of the combiner, or collimator.
But the Rockwell Collins HGS-3500 is another story.
Compact and flexible, the HGS-3500 fits where even the
collimator of most HUDs can't fit.
Better still, the HGS-3500 combines all of those
different components into a single package, with the
image "injected" into the screen from an LED source built
into the base. The resulting HGS package works the same
- actually better - than prior HUD and HGS packages,
while weighing less, taking less space and using less
electrical current.
Arguably the biggest advantage of Rockwell Collins
HGS-3500 grows out of its image-processing power.
Thanks to the flexibility of the HGS-3500's image
generator, the package can display both flight data - all
the air, attitude and heading data typical of a HUD - while
also adding imagery from the avionics stack's synthetic-
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Avionics News December 2016
No label
Avionics News December 2016 - Intro
Avionics News December 2016 - No label
Avionics News December 2016 - Cover2
Avionics News December 2016 - 1
Avionics News December 2016 - 2
Avionics News December 2016 - 3
Avionics News December 2016 - 4
Avionics News December 2016 - 5
Avionics News December 2016 - 6
Avionics News December 2016 - 7
Avionics News December 2016 - 8
Avionics News December 2016 - 9
Avionics News December 2016 - 10
Avionics News December 2016 - 11
Avionics News December 2016 - 12
Avionics News December 2016 - 13
Avionics News December 2016 - 14
Avionics News December 2016 - 15
Avionics News December 2016 - 16
Avionics News December 2016 - 17
Avionics News December 2016 - 18
Avionics News December 2016 - 19
Avionics News December 2016 - 20
Avionics News December 2016 - 21
Avionics News December 2016 - 22
Avionics News December 2016 - 23
Avionics News December 2016 - 24
Avionics News December 2016 - 25
Avionics News December 2016 - 26
Avionics News December 2016 - 27
Avionics News December 2016 - 28
Avionics News December 2016 - 29
Avionics News December 2016 - 30
Avionics News December 2016 - 31
Avionics News December 2016 - 32
Avionics News December 2016 - 33
Avionics News December 2016 - 34
Avionics News December 2016 - 35
Avionics News December 2016 - 36
Avionics News December 2016 - 37
Avionics News December 2016 - 38
Avionics News December 2016 - 39
Avionics News December 2016 - 40
Avionics News December 2016 - 41
Avionics News December 2016 - 42
Avionics News December 2016 - 43
Avionics News December 2016 - 44
Avionics News December 2016 - 45
Avionics News December 2016 - 46
Avionics News December 2016 - 47
Avionics News December 2016 - 48
Avionics News December 2016 - 49
Avionics News December 2016 - 50
Avionics News December 2016 - 51
Avionics News December 2016 - 52
Avionics News December 2016 - 53
Avionics News December 2016 - 54
Avionics News December 2016 - 55
Avionics News December 2016 - 56
Avionics News December 2016 - 57
Avionics News December 2016 - 58
Avionics News December 2016 - 59
Avionics News December 2016 - 60
Avionics News December 2016 - 61
Avionics News December 2016 - 62
Avionics News December 2016 - 63
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Avionics News December 2016 - 65
Avionics News December 2016 - 66
Avionics News December 2016 - 67
Avionics News December 2016 - 68
Avionics News December 2016 - 69
Avionics News December 2016 - 70
Avionics News December 2016 - 71
Avionics News December 2016 - 72
Avionics News December 2016 - Cover3
Avionics News December 2016 - Cover4
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