- Skylens gives a clear view, whatever the weather (Image: Skylens)
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I'm not really at the helm of a helicopter, though. Instead, I am sitting in a simulator at the Farnborough Air Show, UK, wearing an augmented reality headset that's been developed to allow the pilots of business jets and helicopters to take off and land in adverse weather like fog, torrential rain, snow and dust storms.
Unlike big jets, helicopters and small aircraft don't have expensive automatic landing aids – so if weather suddenly changes a pilot can gets caught out and disaster can strike. Last January, two people died in London when the helicopter they were flying in crashed into a crane hidden by fog.
Called Skylens, the system comprises wearable, wraparound smart goggles that are fed video by multispectral cameras embedded in the plane's nose – which can see through any weather conditions. The goggles give the pilot clear images of the terrain, overlaid with information on local air traffic – even in the worst weather. A tiny depth-sensing camera the size of a cigarette lighter, fixed on the instrument panel, tracks pilot head motion – so the images move in sync as the pilot turns their head.
Runway clear ahead
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The idea is that when weather closes in unexpectedly the pilot simply dons the headset and the ground and the runway become visible again.
"This gives pilots much more confidence as they can still look ahead and to either side as normal. This is better than looking down at instruments to perform the landing as that disconnects you from the environment," says Dror Yahav, vice-president of commercial aviation at Elbit Systems, based in Haifa, Israel, the firm that developed Skylens.
The headset works with a plane's other onboard systems so it can display any standard symbols from flight deck instruments in the wraparound display – including artificial horizon, airspeed and altitude. By plugging it into the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), which monitors the positions of nearby aircraft from their radar signals, Skylens can show other air traffic too.
"We have had 150 pilots try it out so far in rain, snow, haze and dust on five different types of aircraft – including large regional jets, business jets, light aircraft and helicopters," says Yahav. "They really like it."
Skylens is undergoing airworthiness certification tests and should be on the market in 2016.
But Simon Brown, a helicopter flight instructor at Heliair in Wellsbourne, UK, thinks it could be a tougher sell than Elbit expects. While the technology sounds interesting, he says it might "encourage pilots to think they are invincible and fly in dangerous conditions".
"I can see this having fantastic applications in the military and search and rescue, but it is the opposite of what I teach civilian student pilots: we don't fly in degraded visibility conditions."