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Defense Intelligence Reference Document Cockpits In The Era Of Breakthrough Flight

Defense Intelligence Agency · 57 pages · text from the file's own layer

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 1 November 2010, is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It proposes a provisional cockpit design for craft driven by speculative breakthrough propulsion, such as control of gravity and inertia and faster-than-light travel. It draws mainly on the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science and on human-machine interface research.

  • p. 18 …For more complex missions, additional crew will be required, and thus additional displays and controls specific…
  • p. 19 …If these distances are determined to be excessive, then automated flight controls are mandatory. Another aspect…
  • p. 31 …operations to maintain fluency between pilot and mission control communications. - Include buffers in checklists to provide…
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Figure 10. Flight Deck of Contemporary Aircraft. As one example, the Airbus A380 Flight deck contains
displays and controls that are indicative of displays and controls that will be needed in breakthrough-era craft.
Image source: (September 2007)
Primary Flight Display
The primary flight display (PFD) provides information about the vehicle's orientation
(pitch, roll, and compass heading), motion (speed and rate of climb), and altitude. It is
centrally located in front of the co-pilot's seat, and a smaller version is available to the
right of the pilot's navigation display. Figure 11 shows a close-up of a PFD that also
shows its heritage from the mechanical instruments of older aircraft that have now
been merged into a single computer-controlled instrument.
This instrument is vital to the safe operation of an airplane. It displays orientation
(pitch, roll, compass heading), motion (forward airspeed, rate of climb), and position
relative to a critical axis (altitude). This particular graphic was selected because it also
shows the lineage to the individual mechanical displays of prior aircraft; artificial
horizon, airspeed, compass heading, altimeter, and rate of climb. Per many of the
recommendations from human factors research, a blend of graphical and alphanumeric
elements are now used, and the central orientation graphic, the "artificial horizon," is a
direct physical analogy to the physical world.
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 57 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.