A sea fog has blown in and covered the heliport I鈥檓 trying to land at. But 鈥� as if by magic 鈥� I can suddenly see the sharp lines of a helicopter landing pad and airport buildings picked out clearly ahead of me. And, as I move my head from side to side, I can clearly see the terrain and symbols representing the position and flight directions of other air traffic nearby.
I鈥檓 not really at the helm of a helicopter, though. Instead, I am sitting in a simulator at the Farnborough Air Show, UK, wearing an augmented reality headset that鈥檚 been developed to allow the pilots of business jets and helicopters to take off and land in adverse weather like fog, torrential rain, snow and dust storms.
Unlike big jets, helicopters and small aircraft don鈥檛 have expensive automatic landing aids 鈥� so if weather suddenly changes a pilot can gets caught out and disaster can strike. Last January, when the helicopter they were flying in crashed into a crane hidden by fog.
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Called Skylens, the system comprises wearable, wrap-around smart goggles that are fed video by multispectral cameras embedded in the plane鈥檚 nose 鈥� which can see through any weather conditions. The goggles give the pilot clear images of the terrain, overlaid with information on local air traffic 鈥� even in the worst weather. A tiny depth-sensing camera the size of a cigarette lighter, fixed on the instrument panel, tracks pilot head motion 鈥� so the images move in sync as the pilot turns their head.
Runway clear ahead
The idea is that when weather closes in unexpectedly the pilot simply dons the headset and the ground and the runway become visible again.
鈥淭his gives pilots much more confidence as they can still look ahead and to either side as normal. This is better than looking down at instruments to perform the landing as that disconnects you from the environment,鈥� says Dror Yahav, vice-president of commercial aviation at , based in Haifa, Israel, the firm that developed Skylens.
The headset works with a plane鈥檚 other onboard systems so it can display any standard symbols from flight deck instruments in the wrap-around display 鈥� including artificial horizon, airspeed and altitude. By plugging it into the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), which monitors the positions of nearby aircraft from their radar signals, Skylens can show other air traffic too.
鈥淲e have had 150 pilots try it out so far in rain, snow, haze and dust on five different types of aircraft 鈥� including large regional jets, business jets, light aircraft and helicopters,鈥� says Yahav. 鈥淭hey really like it.鈥�
Skylens is undergoing airworthiness certification tests and should be on the market in 2016.
But Simon Brown, a helicopter flight instructor at Heliair in Wellsbourne, UK, thinks it could be a tougher sell than Elbit expects. While the technology sounds interesting, he says it might 鈥渆ncourage pilots to think they are invincible and fly in dangerous conditions鈥�.
鈥淚 can see this having fantastic applications in the military and search and rescue, but it is the opposite of what I teach civilian student pilots: we don鈥檛 fly in degraded visibility conditions.鈥�
