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DTIC ADA183303: Evaluation of the F/A-18 Head-Up-Display for Recovery from Unusual Attitudes

Maintaining situational awareness is a critical task in piloting an aircraft. Focusing on spatial orientation, the attitude displays provide information necessary for the pilot to control the aircraft's position in space. In the F/A-18 aircraft the Head-Up-Display (HUD) is the primary attitude indicator. This study compared electrically drawn attitude direction indicator (ADI), the current F/A-18 HUD, and the concurrent use of the ADI and HUD for recovery from unusual attitudes. Results indicated significantly faster recovery times for the ADI. Reasons may be attributed to the superiority of the color coding of the ADI for sky and ground over the dashed and solid pitch lines used for ground/sky coding on the HUD format. Pilot preferences were split between using the ADI as a convenient crosscheck and reduction of visual workload when using the HUD and ADI concurrently compared to using the HUD alone. The results from this study, which employed an electrically drawn ADI, parallel those found in earlier experiments comparing an electromechanical ADI to the F/A-18 HUD. They suggest that a centrally located ADI in the F/A cockpit would aid pilots during unusual attitude recovery.

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