Touchdown Performance with a Computer Graphics Night Visual Attachment

A computer graphics system was programmed to display to the pilot a dynamic perspective view of an airport terminal area comprised of 1200 points of light. The advantages of this system are that it has high resolution and it eliminates the camera optics and electromechanical servos of TV-model systems. The disadvantages are that it lacks fine ground texture and has a small computational delay. A brief experimental evaluation was conducted in which eight airline pilots made 50 landings each in a fixed-based simulation of a DC-8 transport. They were instructed to touch down at 0.6 m/sec. The vertical velocity of the aircraft at touchdown was displayed to the pilot at the completion of each run. Their average vertical velocity at touchdown for the last 10 landings was about 0.8 m/sec. This performance was similar to that obtained on current TV-model systems.