Assessment of a Multimodal Cueing Set for Maintaining Aviators' Situational Awareness in a Degraded Visual Environment

Current and future military rotary-wing operations are anticipated to take place more frequently in urban environments. This will increase likelihood for the presence of obstacles along the flight path. In order to maintain safe and effective flights, cueing for obstacle detection and subsequent avoidance is needed. A study was completed to examine the utility of providing obstacle avoidance cues using multimodal cueing. Three different cueing configurations consisting of combinations of visual, auditory, and tactile cues that provided obstacle avoidance information were examined to evaluate their effect on pilots' situational awareness and workload. Pilots performed low-level flights in a dense urban area with obstacles present. Initial support for multimodal displays of obstacle information was found.