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AAWSAP DIRD, Cockpits in the Era of Breakthrough Flight, November 2010

U.S. Department of War · 2010-11-01 · 57 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 2 …a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense…
  • p. 5 …How these advances may affect future cockpits is described, and this is the central message of…
  • p. 6 …the far future, this study evaluates the impact of having achieved the following breakthrough advancements: • Control…
  • p. 12 …then contemplate the consequences that these advances impose onto other systems of the vehicle-in this…
  • p. 21 …In support of the forgoing discussion, we are speculating that heretofore unknown advances in physics regarding…
  • p. 32 …As evidenced by the gaming industry, the motions of the pilot's hands-whether by a…
  • p. 44 …advances in sensor technology might provide other abilities that are not yet foreseeable . Following the requirements…
  • p. 45 …Taking advantage of foreseeable advances, such images are likely to be in the form of virtual…
  • p. 48 …advances in cockpits for breakthrough flight might be further advanced by taking advantage of the gaming…
  • p. 51 …on an advanced version or next generation of heads-up display to outline the road, pinpoint…
  • p. 53 …Regard less of such advances, the keyboard is still likely to be around for those lingering…
  • p. 55 …Methods in the first 6 rows of t hat table would not require the double hull…
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Excerpt (15 pg) NASA and Kallsman Instrument Corporation (Syosset, NY) discuss how stellar charts
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Quoting Abstract : "NASA has begun a new approach to human factors design standards. For years NASA
STD-3000, Manned Systems Integration Standards, has been a source of human factors design guidance
for space systems. In order to better meet the needs of the system developers, NASA is revising its
human factors standards system. NASA-STD-3000 will be replaced by two documents: set of broad human
systems design standards (including both human factors and medical topics) and a human factors design
handbook. At the present time the standards document is in final review with some disagreement on
several critical issues. The handbook is progressing with November 2008 as the anticipated completion
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Man, and Cybernetics, 1283-1288.
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visually conveyed, incl uding causal connections.
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Intelligent System Interaction. In Proceedings 1992 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and
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processes (instead of alphanumeric displays) are crucial.
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Report (15 pg) Examined human ability to understand and predict motion in the display of dynamic
systems. They found that both physics- educated people and naive people perform about equally on the
intuitive level: particle motion is relatively accurate, but rotational kinematics, especially that concerning
moments of inertia, is relatively poor.
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Book (316 pg) By examining major accidents, the correlation between psychology and the operation of
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have command sequences, which change their pattern in different operating modes, is a problem .
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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.