Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 1 November 2010 and numbered DIA-08-1011-002, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It draws mainly on the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science and speculates about breakthroughs such as control of gravity and inertia and faster-than-light travel. It then proposes a provisional cockpit design with six-degree-of-freedom controls, virtual displays and no windows.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 11/1/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines how cockpit design might change if future aerospace vehicles were ever to achieve major propulsion breakthroughs such as control over gravity and inertia, “propellantless” flight, or faster-than-light travel. The report does not describe an existing or emerging vehicle class. Instead, it asks what such hypothetical capabilities would mean for piloting, displays, controls, and human factors, and it argues that the biggest design challenges would come from full six-degree-of-freedom motion, operation across multiple flight regimes from near-surface flight to orbit and deep space, and the possible separation between the craft’s actual motion and the crew’s internal physical sensations. It combines those assumptions with established human-machine-interface principles and with maturing inputs such as gesture, voice, and brain-machine control to outline a provisional cockpit centered on intuitive displays, stress-tolerant physical controls, and a virtual surround display.
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'FOR OFFI@IAI:: ~SE OPtl::Y effort on the part of the operator and are more prone to mode errors and keyhole effects, particularly during high-stress situations. It was also found that automatically changing display formats added anxiety and mistrust of the system, because the user was now burdened with the additional task of determining why the display just changed. A survey of Boeing 757 and 767 pilots in 1989 revealed that over half felt their workload had actually increased by the high levels of automation introduced into these cockpits. In practice, users forced adaptive displays into fixed displays to improve their utility. 35 The ultimate lesson is that the most critical displays should be fixed to take advantage of the naturally efficient search method where humans use mental models that are analogous to physical objects. For other functions that are less time-critical and where further details are required (e.g., entering destinations and way points into a flight plan), adaptive displays are more advantageous because they require less console space. Other lessons include the following: 36 • Following the same recommendations for the individual elements of adaptive displays that are given for graphical and alphanumeric display components. • Matching the performance characteristics of the displays to the operator's own internal model of the system, and they should be structured to accommodate a user's knowledge. • Packaging information into appropriate, meaningful clusters. • Representing logical and causal relationships should be implemented. • Using "fewer displayed variables with many states" is recommended over the display of "many variables with few states." This necessitates arranging variables in a hierarchy where the lower-level variables are combined into higher-level variables. • Using color to improve the speed of human comprehension. • Accessing back-up information should be easy (familiar procedure), and it should be easy to browse through the system without disturbing its operation. Virtual Displays and Augmented Reality An extension of the adaptive screen is a virtual display where the information is projected into a field of view without the need for a physical display screen. These can function as adaptive displays or be used with gesture-based input systems. Although far-future cockpit technology is still being researched, this study assumes it to be fully matured, such that any information can be displayed clearly in the pilot's full field of view. That being said, the other recommendations about accommodating human norms and the lessons of adaptive displays should be heeded. By that, it is meant that the critical information should remain consistent, and the functions that can tolerate slower user actions can be accommodated with pop-up screens. Also, rather than relying solely on a virtual display, the critical displays should still have a physical, redundant set of displays. UNCLASSIFIED/,<FOA OFFICIO ls Plili ONI.¥ 24
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Official release, from the pursue 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.