Rockwell Collins HUD synthetic vision: Hold Your Head Up

The opportunity to write a blog that references a new product AND one of the best rock anthems of my generation (the 50-somethings) is an honour and a privilege.

The rock anthem is Rod Argent's Hold Your Head Up (click the link and check the hair..)

The product is Rockwell Collins' new synthetic vision system for its HGS-6000 head-up guidance system, which gives pilots just about all the information they need to fly an aircraft whilst looking out the windscreen, holding their head up!

Here's an article I wrote for Flight International's 27 April magazine. What's not in the article are the videos you're about to see.

A caveat first though -  Due to my shaky hands and my ability NOT to get the camera in just the right spot, the view through the head-up display (HUD) is not always full field-of-view, and the brightness of the actual display is not as good in the video as it is in person.

Here's me (middle), looking a bit worse for wear, at Rockwell Collins HGS facility in Portland, Oregon, a company formerly known as Flight Dynamics. To my left is John Wilson, head of marketing for Rockwell Collins HGS. To my right is Peter Howells, principal systems engineer. I was sampling the HGS on a fixed base simulator of a large commercial aircraft, like the Boeing 757, with HGS-6000 and a simulated landscape in the Portland area. We flew the system on 30 March 2010.

That being said, here are four videos that show some of the attributes of this system, the first of its kind, which will fly on Bombardier's Global Vision cockpit for the Global 5000 and Global Express XRS aircraft in 2012 and beyond.

The fourth video isn't so much to do with synthetic vision, but how an HGS can come in handy for recovering an aircraft after an upset condition. Note that the system shows G-force in the middle of the display, a data point that turns out to be very useful, particularly for high angle-of-attack. slow airspeed recoveries (push for 0.5G to recover).