By Ann Roosevelt
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—BAE Systems yesterday unveiled its Q-Sight family of helmet displays and tracking products that can bring improved situational awareness to Army pilots, according to officials.
“It’s a revolutionary means of moving light using holographic wavelength,” John Nix, vice president of business development for BAE’s defense avionics, said at the Army Aviation Association of America annual conference.
“It’s a plug-and-play modular approach providing the aviator a heads-up see-through mission critical display” of such things as sensor data and navigation, Nix said.
Q-Sight display weighs about four ounces and is about the size of a stick of gum, he said.
The Q-Sight family is expected to bring significant improvements in weight, cost, flexibility and performance with a seamless transition between day and night operations, he said. Aviators don’t have to do anything, and lose nothing as Q-sight is compatible with the night vision goggles Army aviators use.
“It’s been flown,” Nix said. “We have 12 demonstrators we are pushing out to the field for flight demonstrations.” The feedback so far has been very positive, with particular mention of the weight advantage.
BAE has a long history in helmet-mounted displays (HMV), with a decade of intensive development, where high-end helmets are now used on Eurofighter and Gripen.
A particular lesson learned is that weight is of critical importance to the pilot, Nix said. Heavy systems have been proven to give pilots eye and neck fatigue and headaches on long missions, so where a system is placed and its weight is important.
As a plug-and-play display, it can be incrementally upgraded, or retrofitted and is compatible with other helmet display technologies.
“When we say plug-and-play literally the signal generators that are being put on all the new Army aircraft, the Mike Model [Black Hawk] and F-Model CH-47 Chinook already have the signal generator so we can just literally plug it in and send the signal to the display,” he said.
The family of Q-Sight products includes the 100, the basic day-night model and scales up to the 250 model, which has a binocular Q-Sight.
The family of Q-Sight overcomes the legacy costs of complex optics, which can have distortions and a loss of acuity and weight, he said. “Holographic techniques couple an LCD display directly onto the combining lens, eliminating all the optics normally associated there.”
Creating a large exit pupil means when the pilot moves his head side he’s going to have to move quite significantly to start loosing the display, he said.
The display clips on to the helmet, and a small box can be carried in a pocket or mounted on the aircraft electrical components. The Black Hawk M-model and F-model Chinook already have such a component, which can feed the display. Optional upgrades include a helmet tracker that would allow the display of FLIR symbology, and some weapons applications can be shown on the display.
“BAE developed a revolutionary optical technology that will significantly help the war fighter,” Nix said.