Unified Flight State Interface Coordination
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current aircraft crew interfaces often provide inconsistent information across different sensory systems, leading to pilot overload and confusion during flight phases, as various sensors may indicate phase transitions and aircraft states independently, resulting in incoherent impressions that can be misinterpreted as normal or hazardous situations.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that synchronize and coordinate visible, audio, and tactile outputs from diverse crew interfaces by receiving flight status information from multiple sources, determining a unified aircraft state and phase of flight, and generating mutually consistent presentations across all interfaces, ensuring synchronized changes in response to state and phase changes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If multiple independent sensor systems provide flight information, then information completeness is improved, but information consistency deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple independent sensor systems and their associated processing functions into a single integrated flight management system. This centralization ensures that all sensors feed into a common processing architecture, eliminating the independence that caused inconsistent phase transition indications while preserving the comprehensive data collection from multiple sources.
2Adaptability or versatility
If multiple independent systems indicate phase transitions independently, then system autonomy is improved, but phase transition indication consistency deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements feedback mechanisms where the centralized flight management system continuously monitors phase transition indications from multiple sources and adjusts its own phase determination based on the collective input. This feedback loop ensures that phase transition indications remain consistent across all interfaces while still leveraging the autonomous detection capabilities of individual sensor systems.
3Loss of information
If pilots integrate multiple independent inputs, then situation awareness is improved, but pilot workload increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a centralized flight management system as an intermediary between the multiple independent sensor systems and the pilot. This intermediary processes, reconciles, and presents unified flight phase information to the pilot, eliminating the need for the pilot to manually integrate conflicting inputs from multiple sources while preserving complete situation awareness.
4Adaptability or versatility
If different systems have different characteristics and timings, then system specialization is improved, but coherence of aircraft state impression deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The flight management system is designed with universal processing capabilities that can handle inputs from various specialized sensor systems with different characteristics and timings. The system performs multi-functional operations including data reconciliation, phase transition detection, and coordinated output generation across multiple interfaces, thereby maintaining coherent aircraft state impressions despite the diversity of input sources.
Data Source
AI summary
Diverse types of crew interfaces (400, 430, 450) are provided for outputting visible, audio and tactile information to a pilot for flight control. A unified estimation of the current aircraft state and of a current phase of flight are made (110), based on flight status information. Respective coordinated visible, audio and tactile presentations for the diverse types of crew interfaces are generated, (120) coordinated so that they provide mutually consistent indications of the unified estimation of the current aircraft state, according to the unified estimation of current flight phase. The respective coordinated presentations are output (130) by the diverse types of crew interfaces to the pilot. By coordinating crew interface outputs across sight, sound and touch senses, this can relieve the pilot of workload in interpreting unsynchronised or incoherent outputs from different types of interfaces.