Airbus Defence and Space has taken the wraps off its fighter cockpit of tomorrow that it's helping to develop as part of Europe's Enhanced Pilot Interfaces & Interactions for Fighter Cockpit (EPIIC) project to build interfaces for next-gen warplanes.
It's 2035 and somewhere in the skies one of Europe's 6th Generation fighter aircraft is on patrol. If we could look through the canopy and over the pilot's shoulder, the scene would look very different to someone whose experience of cockpits comes from watching Top Gun or, in my case, thumbing a worn copy of the Biggles Omnibus.
Instead of clusters of dials or banks of screens, the cockpit looks quite bare. Aside from the throttles and joystick, which wouldn't look out of place in an old Tornado, there isn't much in the way of actual controls. There aren't even as many displays as one would expect. It all looks rather spartan.
At the same time, the feel of the place seems off. The pilot glances from place to place and the aircraft responds. He makes gestures and talks to thin air – and the thin air talks back. Sometimes it seems like the plane is reading the pilot's mind as he looks intently at blank panels as if they held some sort of meaning.
It's all a bit creepy.
However, there's a reason behind this creepiness because we can't see what the pilot sees or feel what he feels. In fact, every second he's being fed a carefully curated stream of data by sight, sound, touch, and even direct to the brain, that keeps him informed of everything relevant to the mission or the safe operation of the craft.
When airplanes first took to the skies beginning in 1908, their cockpits were pretty basic affairs with little more than a throttle, joystick, compass, altimeter, and airspeed indicator. If you were really lucky, you might even have a hook to hang your pocket watch on.
Today, the cockpit is a nightmare, with hundreds of instruments and displays all jockeying for the pilot's attention. Hundreds of hours of training are required to learn which dials or screens are really important and which are only sort of important, which lights are urgent, and which beep or buzz requires your full attention. Now.
That's bad enough in a civilian aircraft, but in a fighter plane there's far more information to process and that can change in a split second as battles change and plans get chucked into the bin like so much used tissue.
However, we're talking about today. In 10 years when fighter pilots are dealing with incredibly complex fighters equipped with AI and acting as a command nexus for hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, and autonomous drone swarms, it'll be far worse.
Instead of trusting to luck, EPIIC, with the backing of the European Defence Fund, is working on radically altering tomorrow's cockpit to serve the needs of the pilots without overwhelming them.
This isn't a blank sheet approach. Far from it. The designers and the pilots working with them want to retain what works. For example, the future cockpit will retain the familiar throttles and joystick because pilots are comfortable with them. In fact, the basic premise of the new design is to make it so the pilot can keep hands on the throttle and joystick as much as possible, which suits the pilots fine.
A consortium of 27 European companies and academic partners, EPIIC has entered the prototyping phase as Airbus conducts ground tests on various new technologies. These include goggle displays that give pilots an augmented reality view of the world and could even project virtual displays onto whatever surface is desired. Pilots can also communicate with the aircraft's AI system by gestures or voice to make selections or change settings. Even the joystick is souped up, with haptic feedback that uses vibrations and resistance to intuitively inform the pilot of flight conditions.
"This ranges from the use of voice commands and voice synthesis to gesture-based interactions and eye tracking," said Belén Calleja, project manager for three EDF programs at Airbus Defence and Space. "Every new feature must facilitate and empower the pilot. There is a philosophy behind it: HOTAS. Cockpit design reflects how pilots have their Hands On Throttles and Stick as much as possible, so as not to interfere with flight. We’re looking at how acceptable it is for the aircraft to talk to pilots, or pilots to talk to the aircraft's systems. It makes sense, for example, to accept a frequency change from the controller with a voice or a gesture, rather than manually entering the digits."
Along with new interfaces, EPIIC also wants to future-proof tomorrow's cockpit by making it independent of whatever plane it is installed in and able to be easily upgraded to meet future mission requirements.
Source: Airbus
