Development and Assessment of Flight Lead Cue for Real-time Guidance and Pilot Workload Reduction in Rotorcraft Shipboard Recovery

Helicopter shipboard launch and recovery are some of the most challenging operations to date, owing to the pilot workload associated with the tasks. A variety of environmental conditions such as random deck motion, heavy sea states and unsteady aerodynamic interactions can be attributed to the same. This paper highlights the development and assessment of a visual flight lead cue for real-time guidance and pilot workload reduction. For a chosen approach-turnland maneuver, the pilot workload is assessed using data from pilot-in-the-loop (PIL) flight simulations. Quantitative metrics based on Time-Frequency Representation (TFR) are used to evaluate pilot workload and the analysis of workload in the presence and absence of the cue is presented. Furthermore, the deviations from the desired path are studied using root-mean-square error (RMSE) for the cue on/off cases. The relation between pilot workload and path following is analyzed to determine the efficacy of the cue provided.