Aviation Gets a Lift

IN THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT FUTURE, THE AVERAGE person could take to the sky in small, safe, affordable and easy-to-fly personal aircraft, traveling four times the speed of today's cars. NASA has selected a team of seven industry partners to help develop the "highway in the sky" system, a key element of the government-industry effort to revitalize general aviation in the United States.

With this system, pilots will follow a preprogrammed destination on a "virtual highway" in the sky, drawn on a highly intuitive, low-cost flat panel display. As the primary flight display of the future, it will displace decades-old "steam gauge" instrumentation.

 

Pilots will have the ability to safely determine their routes, speeds and proximity to dangerous weather, terrain and other airplanes.

In addition to transforming cockpits, the technology developed by the team will redefine the relationship between pilots and air traffic control and fundamentally change the way future general aviation pilots fly. This technology is expected to significantly increase freedom, safety and ease-of-flying by providing pilots with affordable, direct access to information needed for future "free-flight" air traffic control systems.

Pilots will have the ability to safely determine their routes, speeds and proximity to dangerous weather, terrain and other airplanes. This display system and other equipment will provide intuitive situational awareness and enough information for a pilot to perform safely, with reduced workload, in nearly all weather conditions. A multifunction display of position navigation, terrain map, weather and air traffic information is expected, in addition to digital (datalink) radios to send and receive flight data. A solid-state attitude and heading reference system will replace gyroscopes.

The team will work toward the year 2001 to complete hardware and software development and flight certification of this totally new concept for presenting critical, flight-path guidance information to the pilot. This will be the first attempt to certify such a system using affordable commercial "off-the-shelf" computer technology in aircraft.

Development costs will be shared equally between NASA and the industry team, with both contributing approximately $3 million. Team members are Avidyne Corporation of Lexington, Massachusetts, AvroTec Inc. of Portland, Oregon, Lancair of Redmond, Oregon, Raytheon Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, Rockwell Collins of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Seagull Technologies of Los Gatos, California, and AlliedSignal of Olathe, Kansas. AvroTec is the team lead, and Avidyne is technical project manager.

The Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments (AGATE) consortium, consisting of more than 70 members from industry, universities, the Federal Aviation Administration and other government agencies, is fostering the "highway in the sky" system. NASA created AGATE in 1994 to develop affordable new technology, industry standards and certification methods for next-generation single-pilot, four- to six-seat, near all-weather light airplanes.

AGATE and the General Aviation Propulsion engine development program are providing industry partners with technologies leading to a small aircraft transportation system in the early 21st century. These efforts support the national general aviation "roadmap" goal to "enable doorstep-to-destination travel at four times highway speeds to virtually all of the nation's suburban, rural and remote communities."

For more information, contact Keith Henry at Langley Research Center.
Call: 757/864-6120, E-mail: h.k.henry@larc.nasa.gov
Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

The "highway in the sky" system is a key element of the government-industry effort to revitalize general aviation in the United States. The cockpit display system will include a computer-drawn highway that the pilot follows to a preprogrammed destination.

The Advanced Civil Transport Simulator (ACTS) is a futuristic aircraft cockpit simulator designed to provide full-mission capabilities for researching issues that will affect future transport aircraft flight stations and crews.