42 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/NOVEMBER 3/10, 2014 AviationWeek.com/awst
T
here may be no such thing as a dumb ques-
tion, but a dumb idea merits a red Post-It
note in Bob Witwer’s Flight Deck of theFuture lab.
Red , along with yellow notes that mark good ideas, and
blue ones that proclaim “Aha!” moments, are visual touch-
stones on an illustrated storyboard of a typical fl ight laid out
on white boards here at Honeywell Aerospace’s Deer Valley
Advanced Technology campus. Pilots, mechanics, research-
ers, managers and others have been pasting the notes to the
wall of the one-year-old lab when they sample the seedlings
of new modes, modalities and devices designed to help pilots
interact with the fl ight deck during the various phases of a
fl ight. Honeywell researchers and engineers merely have to
turn to the wall of fame or shame to know how they are doing.
Early customer evaluations are part of an evolving design
process that focuses on the “user experience” for human-
machine interfaces, a company-wide ef ort to tease out the
spoken or unarticulated needs of the end users of its products
early in the development cycle. Previously, engineers would
keep projects under wraps until higher-fi delity working pro-
totypes were complete, a practice Witwer, vice president of
Advanced Technology , says that made it more dif cult for
users to give honest feedback. “If you engage the user in the
design process, you fi nd out what they need and you’ve got
another creative mind in on the process,” says Witwer.
For pilots, the cooperative design process should lead to
enhanced situational awareness with intuitive man-machine
interfaces that reduce workload. While the most mature of the
new ideas, which span technology readiness levels 0-4, could
be two years from the marketplace, Honeywell is confi dent its
John Croft Phoenix
Blue Sky
Notes
Customers aid in charting Honeywell’s
course for future fl ight deck
NEXT-GENERATION AVIONICSnew process will bring greater success in terms of customer
demand. As of late September, more than 50 “users,” includ-
ing Aviation Week, had toured the lab and provided feedback
on low-fi delity, rapidly constructed prototypes. Included were
tablet-based fl ight-management system aids, unstabilized ap-
proach avoidance tools, and multimodal avionics controls us-
ing a mixture of voice recognition, gesture and eye-tracking.
Among other projects, engineers in the Flight Deck of the
Future (FD-X) lab recently completed the first phase of a
multiyear project to explore how pilots interact with cockpit
devices. The initial phase covered modes, modalities and de-
vices, whereas the second phase, underway now , is exploring
information visualization. In the third phase, Honeywell will
study decision aids, alerting systems and “how to architect the
overall experience in the cockpit,” says Rakesh Jha, director of
crew interface and avionics platform systems. Although most
of the 450 engineers involved work in Arizona, projects are
underway in labs in the Czech Republic, India and China. At
the Brno lab , Czech engineers are focused on a new energy
management system to help pilots make corrections at higher
altitudes before an approach becomes unstable.
One of the more market-ready technologies at the Deer Val-
ley lab is an aid that simplifi es the legacy “tree” architecture
of a modern fl ight management system (FMS). “We did a lot
of observational ‘voice of the customer’ studies [and] one of
the biggest complaints was that pilots can’t fi nd certain FMS
pages,” says engineering fellow Sue McCullough. “There are
30-40 pages in an FMS, and pilots tend to [stick to] the 4-5
pages they know. We wanted to improve that.” Workload dur-
ing a fl ight can increase dramatically if, for example, air traf c
control changes an arrival procedure, because pilots generally
have to navigate from the FMS “progress” page to the “ap-
proach” page, located four or more pages beneath, to make
changes. Among other input methods, the team decided to try
voice control. Customers, including Gulfstream pilots, were
impressed with an early prototype in the FD-X. “It wasn’t a
panacea, but it would do functions you don’t do frequently or
fi nd data you might not have at your fi ngertip,” she says.
The next step was to integrate a portable tablet with Hon-
eywell’s Primus Epic integrated cockpits, in particular with
the company’s next-generation FMS, a unit that is on the
Gulfstream G650 and Boeing 747-8. E volutions of the FMS
are already underway, including for the Gulfstream G500 andHoneywell technology
guru, Bob Witwer (far
right), explains the work-
ings of the FD-X lab.
HONEYWELL PHOTOS
Video Take a look inside Honeywell’s FD-X lab—tap here in
the digital edition or go to AviationWeek.com/FD-X圀漀爀氀搀䴀愀最猀⸀渀攀琀圀漀爀氀搀䴀愀最猀⸀渀攀琀
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