BACKGROUND

Helicopter landing and take-off in degraded visibility caused by blowing sand or dust (brown-out) may distort the pilot’s comprehension of the helicopter’s position. This is a serious problem that may lead to unattended lateral drift or descending rate. We have previously shown advantages of redundant tactile and multimodal information a simulated combat vehicle. In order to investigate if lateral drift in a helicopter can be reduced by use of a drift display an experiment with a simulated helicopter was performed. Three types of drift displays were tested: visual, tactile, and bimodal display and compared with the primary display that did not present lateral drift. Compared with the primary display lateral drift was reduced with all three drift display configurations. This indicates the value of a drift display in the helicopter and the possibilities of disengaging the pilot’s vision for parallel tasks by the use of tactile or bimodal drift displays