Hover training display: rationale and implementation

Hover is an essential component of rotary wing aviation but learning to hover is extremely difficult. From the viewpoint inside the cockpit, the beginning student neither sees nor understands what needs to be done to control the aircraft. This is because the out-the-window real world visual cues suffer from two primary shortcomings. First, the real world visual cues are ambiguous. For example, the relative motion of the ground moving under the nose may indicate forward flight, pitching upward, vertical ascent, or any combination of these. Second, human ability to judge aircraft pitch by itself is insufficient to stabilize the aircraft; such other clues as relative motion or parallax are needed to augment pitch judgments to set aircraft attitude adequately. We report a training display (TD) designed to assist training rotary wing hover. The TD is specifically constructed to communicate aircraft performance and attitude to the student pilot and to disambiguate the external world's features and motions cues into symbology that allows each cue independently to support sufficient levels of parameter resolution. Our preliminary observations, based on pilot data collected during the design, parameterization, and calibration of the TD indicate that it meets its goals in a fashion that enables beginning flight students to understand and interpret the motion cues of the real world out-the-window view.