NASHVILLE, Tenn.–A major Army Aviation Systems Project Office initiative is creating an acquisition program to give pilots and crews the ability to see through limited visibility conditions such as dust or snow, according to the project manager.
A study led by the Program Executive Officer Aviation with other safety and sustainment offices had determined that “the greatest threat to aircraft was the degraded visual environment (DVE),” said Col. Anthony Potts here during a media briefing at the Army Aviation Association of America professional forum and exhibition.
For example, final approach to a landing zone in the desert can get into a “brownout” condition as helicopter rotors kick up sand, Potts said. That can lead to a loss of visual reference with the ground. As a pilot loses situational awareness, the aircraft can drift along the ground, and if the skids, wheels, or any other part of the helicopter catches something on the ground, it is possible for it to roll over, and pilots can’t recover from that. The aircraft comes apart, which is expensive in terms of lives and airframes.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense Helicopter Safety Task force allocated $226 million over the Fiscal year 2011-2015 Program Objective Memorandum (POM) to address the DVE issue. Part of that money will be used for the ONS effort.
Additionally, PEO Aviation is standing up a DVE program of record and around the Sept. 12 timeframe, “we want a materiel development decision (MDD) to go to pre-milestone A,” Potts said. This effort will be to take a holistic approach to DVE from flight controls to synthetic vision.
The ONS effort is for delivery of five Helicopter Autonomous Landing Systems (HALS) units, three will go on operational aircraft, one test asset, and one spare. The goal is to have these units delivered and operational 18-24 months from contract award.
Science and Engineering Serices Inc. (SESI) awarded a contract to Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) to fulfill the DVE ONS. SNC’s HALS combines real-time 3D radar imagery with digital terrain map, satellite imagery and DVE specific guidance symbology to provide a complete DVE solution for takeoff, approach and landing operations in fog, brownouts, and other DVE’s.
The office is working on DVE with on a variety of solutions, to include millimeter wave radar, which was found after evaluations to be the best solution able to penetrate heavy dust and obscurants.
“It paints a picture of the ground in front of you, the pilot sees some relative motion indicators, if it’s say, a Humvee, or a ditch,” he said. Training is key and so are databases that map the earth and can be used to build a virtual picture of what the world looks like. The databases may not paint the Humvee or the ditch, but it could provide part of the solution, painting a virtual world for the pilot, giving him a symbology set, advanced digital flight stabilitization controls and the ability to create a more stable platform.
The Aviation Systems project office has other major aviation systems initiatives under way to include being the focal point for Program Executive Office Aviation for planning for all aviation elements in the Army’s Network Integration Evaluation (NIE). Building the network to connect soldiers to their weapons, other systems, aviation and each other is the number one Army modernization priority.
For the systems project office, the NIEs, held twice a year at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., are to work the aviation portion of the network, considered “hard and expensive,” Potts said, while doing the ground network first.
However, Potts said, “the issue is that it’s one network, ground or air,” and aviation is the enabler of the network, able to break line of sight barriers and can extend the capable range of the networks.
Soldiers at the tactical edge will have Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW), generally Rifleman Radio, with a range of around 2 kilometers, Potts said. However, put an aviation platform up in the air, and you have an enabler that extends the Rifleman Radio range some 20 kilometers.
“That’s huge if you are in the fight in difficult terrain–to enable the network to extend its range,” Potts said.
Army aviation understands the concept of a “roamers” network. Brigades travel together and don’t leave a network and come back, he said. Aviation is in and out of networks—several of them, all the time and that’s where complexities begin.
Aviators want the SRW position location data out there, and voice communications, so as helicopters are inbound they can plan their route to the area of fire, evaluate the situation en route and come in “trigger hot”—a lethal capability to have, Potts said.
“We have to try to figure out how to do that,” he said.