TUD’s Institute for Flight and Control Systems has a long established background, particularly in the area of flight systems. With the appointment of the present Head of the Institute in 1982, the scope of work was significantly extended by safety and human factors activities.

In a highly fruitful cooperation with Diehl Avionik Systeme, new display formats providing an integral representation of the flight situation and improving crew situational awareness have been developed and investigated. This has led to a pioneering role in the development of Synthetic Vision Displays. Various types of displays, ranging from standard head down displays to head-up and head mounted displays, are under development an can be prototyped in the institute’s highly configurable research cockpit simulator. A focus of work is the avoidance of CFIT accidents by presenting 3D information on the surrounding terrain to pilots.

As terrain and airport databases are the backbone of any Synthetic Vision system, TUD started research on aviation databases, developing a new concept for data generation, handling and storage and was a major contributor to the international standards EUROCAE/RTCA ED-98/DO-276 (User Requirements for Terrain and Obstacle Data) and ED-99/DO-272 (User Requirements for Aerodrome Mapping).

In addition to the cooperation with national and international industry partners, TUD has also been involved in various EU-funded projects, e.g. AWARD, ISAWARE, VICTORIA and ISAWARE II.

In FLYSAFE, TUD will participate in the development of aviation databases, a database server and an advanced human-machine interface (integral 3D terrain, obstacle & traffic representation) for the flight deck of the future.

TUD’s primary focus of research is increasing both safety and transport capacity in civil aviation to meet the challenges resulting from increasing air traffic. By participating in FLYSAFE, TUD expects to keep research activities on aviation databases & synthetic vision at the edge of technology.