HMD System for Operational Safety of General Aviation––Outline of the HMD System and Lever Status Recognition

According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, in Japan, the number of small aircraft accidents/incidents is larger than the number of large aircraft accidents/incidents. The reason why there are so many small aircraft accidents/incidents is the higher incidence of human errors, and research on accident/incident prevention is not progressing when compared to large aircraft. The purpose of this research is to aim to reduce the number of these accidents/incidents caused by human error. As a specific goal, we aim to develop a Head Mounted Display (HMD) system that recognizes human error and provides a visual cue to the pilot when it occurs. This system identifies that human error has occurred when an operation lever is not in the correct position, determines the content of the warning and displays it. The correct position of the lever is determined for each flight phase, such as take-off, cruise and landing. Therefore, this system requires the technology to recognize the status of the lever, to determine the active flight phase, to estimate whether or not an error has occurred based on these outputs, and to then set and display appropriate warnings. This time, we describe the outline of the HMD system and the development status of the individual technologies described above.