Aircraft attitude awareness from visual displays

Abstract Rapid appreciation of spatial orientation is essential when recovering from unusual attitudes during aircraft combat and emergency manoeuvres. This paper is concerned with attitude awareness derived from aircraft instruments, in particular the comprehension of pitch, roll and horizon information from head-up displays. Human visual orientation is discussed with respect to dual-mode theory of focal and ambient visual information processing, with particular emphasis on the perception of pattern orientation and the relative contributions of global and local features of multidimensional structures. It is argued that global organizational characteristics of display formats are important and neglected sources of cues for attitude awareness. An improved pitch scale symbology for head-up displays is proposed, based on empirical evidence from studies of operator performance on unusual attitude recovery tasks.

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