Development of highway-in-the-sky displays for flight-path guidance: History, performance, results, guidelines

Highway-in-the-sky and pathway-format displays have received considerable attention in the research community, and several applications have been examined for transport and attack aircraft. Only recently have these displizyformats received serious attention for use in General Aviation (GA), and several have beenfIown in GA aircraft, mm without the benefit of rigorous human j&tom evaluations during the design phase. This paper addresses three areas of inter-est: First, the origins and subsequent development of pathway-style displays and related ye-search; second, results of some recent studies in which format variations were comparedfor their efficacy1 as indicated by both training and end performance data; and third, general guidelines that may be useful to both designers andcertifiers. Re?ommendations ore provided regarding pictorial.formats, color, display field-of-view, command-guidance indicators, and needfor auxiliary quantitative Errol indicators BACKGROUND The idea of replacing or supplementing the usual conven-tional guidance instrumentation in an aircraft with pictorial or graphical displays has existed for over 50 years. It is onl