Originally published HMD for Rotary-Wing – Bridging the Situational Awareness Gap Between Pilots and Their Crew on by https://modernbattlespace.com/2025/01/28/hmd-for-rotary-wing-bridging-the-situational-awareness-gap-between-pilots-and-their-crew/ at Modern Battlespace
Much like the rest of the battlespace, the lower tier of the air domain is becoming increasingly contested and demanding for today’s warfighters – which is having a major operational impact on the ability of rotary-wing and tilt-rotor aircrews to efficiently and successfully execute missions.
Today’s Department of Defense (DoD) is preparing for conflicts with peer and near-peer adversaries. These adversaries have intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities that rival those of the U.S. military, making it essential that more rotary-wing and tilt-rotor aircraft operations are conducted at night and in other degraded visual environments (DVE) where adversaries are less capable.
Simultaneously, the airspace is more crowded than ever before due to the increasing numbers of autonomous aircraft in the same airspace – both friendly and enemy. To increase survivability, pilots are also being asked to fly lower and faster. This means that modern pilots are operating in more congested environments filled with manned aircraft, autonomous aircraft (both friend and foe), and terrestrial obstacles such as changes in topography, terrain, and man-made hazards like wires and towers. Complicating matters further, due to advancements in the aircraft, themselves, pilots are being asked to do all of this at much higher rates of speed.
While pilots are occupied with operating the aircraft, navigating, coordinating with other aircraft and ground units, and avoiding midair collisions, the crews face other challenges – including maintaining situational awareness with their pilots.
This means that modern helicopter pilots are flying at high rates of speed in congested, contested air domains where obstacles can come from practically anywhere. And they’re doing this while simultaneously monitoring their environments to provide continuous directives, updates, and target information to the aircrew onboard.
But the pilot’s job isn’t the only one getting more complicated.
Onboard Situational Awareness Gaps
Aircrews on rotary-wing and tilt-rotor aircraft are also under growing pressure in these increasingly contested environments. Their critical in-flight tasks, including airspace surveillance and operating the aircraft’s weapons systems, are becoming more challenging, considering their need to operate against sophisticated adversaries in complex degraded visual environments.
While pilots are occupied with operating the aircraft, navigating, coordinating with other aircraft and ground units, and avoiding midair collisions, the crews face other challenges – including maintaining situational awareness with their pilots. Pilots are expected to effectively describe and provide situational awareness of what they see so that their crews can help with airspace and ground deconfliction – and also successfully engage targets. Unfortunately, verbal radio communication is often inefficient – taking too long and wasting valuable time between order and execution and even more challenging in moments of compounding crisis. This is especially true when other critical tasks and workload demands must be met in the air.
It can be especially challenging for crews to pinpoint the exact direction where a pilot is attempting to direct their attention. When a pilot communicates a target to a crew member on the aircraft, that pilot cannot show them exactly where and what they’re talking about. Through verbal communication, crew members can get a description but cannot see exactly what the pilot sees. And if the directive is to engage a particular target, the crew chiefs’ current weapon aiming capabilities are limited (iron sights or lasers at night). This is inefficient and slows down the process of finding and engaging targets at a time when a single shot may be all the crew gets due to the increasing sophistication of the adversary.
HMDs for Rotary Pilots (and Their Crew)
Rather than relying on verbal communication during rotary wing engagements to get on the same situational awareness page, the military is increasingly looking for helmet-mount display systems (HMDS) to provide visualization capabilities for pilots. However, to ensure there is a common operating picture across the entire aircraft crew, the military needs to consider the benefits of issuing HMDS to everyone in the aircraft.
Today’s HMD systems can enable military aviators to visualize obstacles, airspace, threats, and terrain. They can also provide pilots with all the mission-critical data and integrated capabilities they need to accomplish their mission. However, these same technologies can also more efficiently provide and share the required situational awareness between the pilot and the crew.
These systems can also be battery-powered with mission data being wirelessly fed without relying on a direct power connection to the aircraft. This provides crew chiefs with maneuverability within the aircraft while still leveraging the digital benefits of visualizing mission-critical data right in front of their eyes. Modern HMD systems can allow crew chiefs to move around the craft to man a weapon, check a sling load, onboard or offboard people from the aircraft, or any other mission segment that requires mobility inside or outside the craft.
It can be especially challenging for crews to pinpoint the exact direction where a pilot is attempting to direct their attention. When a pilot communicates a target to a crew member on the aircraft, that pilot cannot show them exactly where and what they’re talking about.
Modern HMDS solutions can also effectively bridge the situational awareness and visualization gap between pilots and crew members by enabling pilots to more effectively show the crew what they see and demonstrate where they need to place their attention, using coordinated head-tracked location indications of where each crew member is looking. For example, if a pilot had symbology in the HMD showing where the crew chief was looking, the pilot can more readily talk the crew chief onto a point or target of interest.
Instead of solely relying on radio communication and voice to relay target information, crew members could be equipped with HMDS and have access to the same battlespace operating picture that the pilot sees, and know where to look, aim, and engage.
Conclusion
The ability to establish situational awareness and share information more quickly, efficiently, and effectively reduces the workload for everyone onboard and enables greater operational efficiency. That’s because pilots can more quickly indicate a concern by digitally using virtual tools than they ever could communicating verbally.
Operating rotary-wing aircraft at very low altitudes at very high speeds – especially in extremely contested battlefields against sophisticated adversaries – requires cutting-edge capabilities for rotary pilots and their crews. Equipping them with HMDS technologies enables them to function efficiently in those environments and to successfully accomplish their missions.
Originally published HMD for Rotary-Wing – Bridging the Situational Awareness Gap Between Pilots and Their Crew on by https://modernbattlespace.com/2025/01/28/hmd-for-rotary-wing-bridging-the-situational-awareness-gap-between-pilots-and-their-crew/ at Modern Battlespace
Originally published Modern Battlespace
