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Since the entry of coalition forces to Afghanistan and Iraq, a steep rise at the rate of accidents has occurred as a result of flying and landing in Degraded Visual Environment (DVE) conditions. Such conditions exist in various areas around the world and include bad weather, dust and snow landing (Brownout and whiteout) and low illumination at dark nights. A promising solution is a novel 3D conformal symbology displayed on head-tracked helmet mounted display (HMD). The 3D conformal symbology approach provides space stabilized three-dimensional symbology presented on the pilot helmet mounted display and has the potential of presenting a step function in HMD performance. It offers an intuitive way for presenting crucial information to the pilots in order to increase Situational Awareness, lower the pilots' workload and thus enhancing safety of flight dramatically. The pilots can fly "heads out" while the necessary flight and mission information is presented in intuitive manner, conformal with the real world and in real-time. . Several Evaluation trials had been conducted in the UK, US and Israel using systems that were developed by Elbit Systems to prove the embodied potential of the system to provide a solution for DVE flight conditions: technology, concept and the specific systems.

Within the recent years many different proposals have been published about the best design of display contents for helicopter pilot assistance during DVE landing. The guidance cues are typically shown as an overlay possibly on top of additional sensor or database imagery. This overlay represents the main information source for helicopter pilots for landing. Display technology within this field applies two different principles: Multicolor head-down display (panel mount), and monochrome head-up display (helmet-mounted). For both types the state-of-the-art imagery doesn't make use of conformal symbol sets. They rather expose the pilots to mixed views (2D forward and bird's eye view). Even so the trained pilots can easily interpret the presented data it doesn't seem to be the best design for head-up displays. A study was realized to compare different proposed symbol sets (e.g. BOSS, DEVILA and JEDEYE). During approach and landing trials in our helicopter simulator these different formats were presented to the pilots on head-down and helmet-mounted displays. The evaluation of this study is based on measured flight guidance performance (objective measures) and on questionnaires (subjective measures). The results can pave the way for the planned development of a new conformal wide field of view perspective display for DVE landing assistance.