DEM integrity monitor experiment (DIME) flight test results

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DEM integrity monitor experiment (DIME) flight test results

Uijt de Haag, Maarten / Young, Steve D. / Sayre, Jonathon / Campbell, Jacob / Vadlamani, Ananth

This paper discusses flight test results of a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) integrity monitor. The DEM Integrity Monitor Experiment (DIME) was part of the NASA Synthetic Vision System (SVS) flight trials at Eagle-Vail, Colorado (EGE) in August/September, 2001. SVS provides pilots with either a Heads-down Display (HDD) or a Heads-up Display (HUD) containing aircraft state, guidance and navigation information, and a virtual depiction of the terrain as viewed 'from the cockpit'. SVS has the potential to improve flight safety by increasing the situational awareness (SA) in low to near zero-visibility conditions to a level of awareness similar to daytime clear-weather flying. This SA improvement not only enables low-visibility operations, but may also reduce the likelihood of Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT). Because of the compelling nature of SVS displays high integrity requirements may be imposed on the various databases used to generate the imagery on the displays even when the target SVS application does not require an essential or flight-critical integrity level. DIME utilized external sensors (WAAS and radar altimeter) to independently generate a 'synthesized' terrain profile. A statistical assessment of the consistency between the synthesized profile and the profile as stored in the DEM provided a fault-detection capability. The paper will discuss the basic DIME principles and will show the DIME performance for a variety of approaches to Runways 7 and 25 at EGE. The monitored DEMs are DTED Level 0, USGS with a 3-arcsec spatial resolution, and a DEM provided by NASA Langley. The test aircraft was a Boeing 757-200.