Transcription of the Workshop on General Aviation Advanced Avionics Systems

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Produced by the NASA Center for Aerospace Information (CASI) NASA CR 137861 r ;(NASA-CR-137861) TRANSCRIPTION OF THE N76-28233 :WORKSHOP ON GENERAL AVIATION ADVANCED AVIONICS SYSTEMS (Staafora Univ.) 167 p HC x'$6.75 CSCL 01D Unclas G3/06 47904 Transcription of the WORKSHOP ON GENERAL AVIATION ADVANCED AVIONICS SYSTEMS Stamford University November 5-6, 1975 Prepared Under Contract No. NAS2-9023 by Stanford University Stanford, California May 1976 for National Aeronauticsand Space Administration Ames Research Center Moffett field, California ^. ' ^1> AUG 1976 RECEIVED M.

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^s 1NFu' BRAW Transcription Of The WORKSHOP ON GENERAL AVIATION-ADVANCED AVIONICS SYSTEMS at Stanford University V November 5-6, 1975 Sponsored By NASA.-Ames Research Center Guidance and Navigation Branch

Moffett Field, California 94035

Dallas Denery Brent Creer Directed By Daniel B. DeBra, Professor Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering; Director, Guidance & Control Laboratory Stanford University Stanford, California 94305 Transcription Edited By Michael Tashker .

Stanford Research Institute 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, California 94025 FREEACE STAVFORD, CALIFORA71 943o5 STANFORD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF AERONAUTICS AND ASTRONAUTICS 24.

October 1975 WILLIAM F. DURAND BUILDING (415) 497.

-33883389 WORKSHOP ON GENERAL AVIATION-ADVANCED AVIONICS SYSTEMS at Stanford University, Durand, Rm 450 November 5-6, 1975 The NASA Ames Research Center is implementing a program to pro- vide the critical information required for the design of reliable, low cost, advanced avionics systems applicable to general aviation in the 1980's and beyond. As a part of this program, a`Workshop is being held to (1): identify emerging electronic technologies in other in- dustries that may have application to General Aviation Avionics and (2); provide guidance for the NASA General Aviation-Advanced Avionics Systems program, Enclosed is a preliminary agenda. The first five agenda items will consist of semiformal presentations, and are intended to set the stage for two Panel discussions which are the heart of the Workshop.

Although the Panels will be conducted in the presence of the Workshop attendees, it is intended that the discussion will be restricted to the pre-selected panel members, The Panels will then join the Workshop in joint discussion to formulate the final conclusions and recommenda- tions.

The "General Aviation Avionics Overview' will be presented by general aviation airframe and avionics supplier representatives, with critiques by selected participants of the Workshop. Agenda items 4 and 5 are' primarily intended to bring source material to the Workshop on electronic developments resident in advanced military and commer- cial systems, remotely piloted vehicles, the automotive industry, and the solid state electronic industry. It is intended that the participants in these two agenda items will focus on those technolo- gies that they think could be beneficial to General Aviation, The first Panel will discuss the application of advanced component technologies to General Aviation. This will include sensors, displays, integrated circuits, microprocessors, minicomputers, etc, This Panel will identify where NASA support could benefit the development of needed basic components for General Aviation through modifications of components produced for other industry groups, The Panel will also be asked to form a position on NASA support of other component developments such as the design of special purpose LSI chips that could be used by the General Aviation Avionics industry, The second Panel will discuss system architectures for future General Aviation Avionics Systems, Such topics as the role of multiplexers, use of microprocessors or minicomputers, and the advantages of distributed vs centralized systems for General Aviation then be asked to make recommenda will be discussed, The Panel will tions for NASA sponsored research in these areas.

All members of the Workshop will then participate in an open discussion to suggest topics overlooked, and to prepare the Way for the Workshop summary and recommendations. In the afternoon of the second day, small groups will be formed to draft portions of the Final Report, li PAGE IS ORIGINAL OF POOR QUALnTY ROSTER { AVCO Corporation, Lycoming Divsn Federal. Aviation Administration 652 .0liver Street, Williamsport, ha 17701 Great. Lakes Region Frank Riddell, V—P,_ Engineering 2300 E. Devon Avenue (717) 323-6181 Des Plaines, Iil EO018 Ray Borowski, (312) 694-3377 Beech Aircraft Corp, 9709 East Central, Wichita, Kansas 67201 tGates Learjet Corp„ J. Johnson Mr. Mucci 8220 IV. Harry, Wichita, Kansas, 67201 (316) 689-7085 Paul Cork (316) 722-5640 Bendix Corporation, Electronic Fuel injection Divsn Gorham Associates, Consultants 900 1Y, Maple Rd,, Troy, Mich., 48084 P.O. Box 1347 Jerry Rivard (313) 362-1800 Thousand Oaks, Calif,, 91360 Mr. Jahn Gorham Boeing Company (B-8240) (805) 498-3537 Flight Controls Technology, Renton, Wa 98124 Dick Schoonman, Chief Engineer, ;IS: 77-19 Hcreywell, Gov. S; Aeronautical Prods Divsn (206) 237-2060; Gordon Annin, MS !

77-30 600. Second St,, North, Hopkins, Minn .55343 Buster Seacord- (612) 542-5758 Cessna Aircraft Company P.O. Box 1521, Wichita, Kansas, 67201 Hughes Aircraft Company Paul .Vanden ,Berge M-S: C-106, Bldg, 6, (316) 946-6068 Culver City, Calif., 90230 Louis M. Seeberger (213) 391-0711, X-3375 Collins Radio Group, Rocicwell International Intel Corporation, 3065 Bowers Ave,, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52406 Santa Clara, Calif,, 95051 Charles A. Fenwick Dr. Robert Noyce, Chairman of the Board (319) 395-3220 (415) 246-7501 Dolco Electronics, Div, G1I Corp, Kokomo Indiana, 46901 Dr. Frank Jaumot (317) 459-7285 (Cont) Unable to attend ROSTI?It (Cont) Bing Radio Corporation Southern Illinois University at Cnrbondale 400 N. Rcl;ers Rd., Olathe, Kansas, 66061 Dept, Electrical .Sciences & Systeris Engn'g Jervy Farrar (913) 782-0400 Carbondale, Illinois 62901 Prof. Thomas :;cCalla, Jr, (618) 53G-2364 t Lockheed Missiles & Space Company Prof, Lce Grismore P.O. Box 504, Sunnyvale, Ca 94086 Chuci Franklin, M-S: 55-81, Bldg, 572 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) (415) 742-0326 Ravenswood Ave,, Menlo Park, Ca. 94025 Dr, Michael Tashker, Bldg. 202B MILCO International, Inc. (415) 326-6200, Ext. 2735 16532 Cotuit Circle Huntingtortt Beach, Ca., 92649 Sperry Rand Corporation (711) 846-7336 Sperry Flight Systems Dr', Richard Smyth P.O. Box 2529 NARCO Avionics, Commerce Drive Phoenix, Arizon ( 85002 Fort Washington, Penn, 19034 Steve Osder G02) 942-2311 John Bail (215) 643-2900 Stanford University Dept, Aeronautics & Astronautics t NASA Headquarters Washington, D.C. 20546 Stanford, Calif., 94305 Code RI Roger L. Winblade Prof. Bryson (415) 497-3601/3602 ' Ed Buckley; (202) 755-2399 Prof. Dan DeBra (415) 497-3388/3389 NASA-Ames Research Center Systems Control, Inc.

>94035 1801.Page still Rd., Moffett Field, Calif,, Palo Alto, Ca, 94304 Brent Creer, Chief, Guidance `& Nav Branch Dr, James Tyler, Pres. (415) 494-1165 M-S: 210-9 (415) 965-5427 Systems Technology,_, Inc.

-S: FSN Dr. Dallas Denery, M210-9, Org, 13766 S. Hawthorne Blvd,, (415) 965-5435 Hawthorne, Calif,, 90250 s Duane McRuer Pres. (213) 679-2281 NASA — Langley Research Center ' Hampton, Virginia 23665 Electronics Laboratory Center Mr. Henry Jack Reid, Jr., Code 25001 Mail Code 494, (804) 827-3551 San Diego, Calif. 92152 .: Pareis Soltan (714) 225-7936 Research Triangle Institute (RTI) Research Triangle Park Durham, No, Carolina 27709 Mr. Dick Alberts (919) 549-8311 RCA Avionic Systems Division 8500 Balboa Blvd, Van Nuys, Ca,, 91409 (213) 594-8111 Mr. George Lucchi Rockwell International, General Avionics Div.

5`100 No. Ro :%we' 1, Bcthamy , Oklahoma, 73008 Mr. Frank Martin (405) 789-5000

o"r3N.^

OF ^ P Q pvv L`nable to attend.

l v' TABLE OF CONTENTS Page SUMMARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 .1. Registration Introductions Coffee at Room 450, Durand, Aero & Astro - Dean Kays . . . 5 2, Introductory Comments . . . .

h a, Welcoming Comments (Stanford, D. Debra) . . . .

b. General Aviation-Advanced Avionics Program. Review (NASA Ames, D. Denery) . .

3, General Aviation Avionics Overview a, Airframe Manufacturer's Point of View . . . . . . .

(P. Vanden Berge, Cessna) b, Avionics Manufacturer's Point of View (J, Farrar, King Radio Corp.)

Coffee Break 4. Sources of Applicable Technology and System Architectures , , , Automotive Industry (F, Jaummt, Delco-GM). , , a. 29 Remotely Piloted Vehicles (C. Franklin, LMSC) . . .

b. 42 c, Commerical Aircraft (R. Schoenman' Boeing) , , 48 .

d. Military Aircraft-Ordinance (R. Smyth, . , , . , . 53 MILCO Int 1) Lunch 5, Advanced Electronic and Display Concepts a. Electronic Solid State Industry (R.Noyce, . . . . 58 .

Intel) b. Advanced Display Devices (P, Soltan, Navy) 70 Coffee Break Component Technologies Panel 6. Panel No, ,1; (Duane McRuer, Chairman,`; with Bendix, Debra, Farrar, Franklin, Grismore, J ,aumot, Noyce, Riddell, Seeberger, and Soltan) a, What advances in component technologies are expected, based on the demands of other industry groups that could have application to General Aviation?

- v TABLE OF CONTENTS (Cont) NOVEMBER 5, 1975 (Cont) Page b. Identify components being developed for other industry groups that could be made applicable to General Aviation through modification. Which of these modifications, if any, should be developed by NASA and evaluated by NASA?

C. Should NASA support other developments, such as masks, for any special purpose LSI chips?

NOVEMBER 6, 1975 . . . . . . 114 1, Panel No. 2: System Architectures Panel (R. Smyth, Chairman, with Annin, Bail, Fenwick,'Gorham, Johnson, McCalla, Osder, and Seacord) a. What system architectures, are being pur- sued by other industry groups that could have application to General Aviation?

b. What impact would industry controlled standards have on system architectures for General Aviation?

What guidelines should be placed on the c.

system architectures being developed and evaluated by the NASA in the course of the General. Aviation-Advanced Avionics Program?

Coffee Break and Panel Interaction 144 Workshop Discussion 2.

(McRuer and Smyth, presiding) a. Effect of evolving architecture on com- ponent development, b, Influence of future component technology on system architectures.

Summary of Workshop Recommendations (DeBra) , .. 156 3.

Lunch "i.

WORKSHOP SUMMARY (DeBra, Denery, Mc Ruer, Smyth, Tashker) General Aviation is a diverse market with product prices spanning two orders of magnitude. This causes a need for a wide range of models and types of equipment which, in turn, keeps the total number of any one product very small in proportion to other industries. Nevertheless, general aviation has aggressively adapted new technology to provide the user with a wide range of avionics equipment from which to choose in order to enhance the safety and utilization of general aviation aircraft_ at a reasonable price. Factors that affect the cost of the different lines of equipment are performance and level of capability. Reliability is not sacrificed in the lower cost systems.

The price constraints, the relatively small market, and the severe environment in which general aviation avionics must operate, present a technological challenge for providing desired improvements. Of primary importance are further improvements in reliability, ability to remove heat from the avionics compartments, reduction of weight and space require- ments, ability to interface different manufacturers equipment in a convenient manner, time-sharing of displays, and reduction of the pilof workload devoted to navigation, communication, and control tasks. Asa result of technology advancements in certain higher volume product lines there is promise that many of the avionic system improvements can be attained at little additional costs over todays' systems. For example, _ advances in the semiconductor and calculator industries allow sophisticated computation at relatively ` low cost.

Sensors, displays, and actuators appear to be the principal problem areas. The automotive, watch, appliance, and television industries have similar needs and should be watched carefully for advances in these technologies. The electronic market; potential for the automobile industry alone is-more-than one billion dollars. The sensor, display, and actuator requirements for the automobile appear, in many ways, similar to those for general aviation. Although the cathode ray tube still appears to be the least expensive high resolution general-purpose display, the watch, calculator, and television industries have been pursuing other display technologies extensively that could have application to General Aviation.

The commercial and military aircraft fields have many requirements that are similar to those of general aviation and have, in many cases, developed a technology for achieving these requirements. However, the cost of these technologies is beyond the range of general aviation. It was Oe feeding of the Workshop that General Aviation Avionics will continue to depend on the fallout of both non-aerospace and aerospace applications.

Even with the chance of significant technology transfer from the above mentioned industry groups, it was emphasized by one participant that this would probably not result in significantly lower cost, but would allow more capability for the same cost. It was pointed out that today, even if the electronics components were supplied to the manufacturer at no charge, the cost to the user for the end product would only be reduced by 20 to 30 percent. The labor,, packaging, retailing, servicing and warrantee protection--which account for the largest portion of the costs--would not be affected.

The Workshop was unanimous in its belief that the use of advanced digital technology will improve capability and thereby enhance safety.

Automated procedures for navigation, communication, and control are only a few of many possibilities that exist. The recent developments of integrated circuit transducers might be usable with digital processors to provide estimates of all the aircraft states, including attitudes and attitude rates, thereby replacing the need for conventional gyros.

The use of built-in test, equipment to ease maintenancecould become feasible without adding additional sources of failure to the unit as is the case in contemporary analog a,.ionic systems.

It was felt that advanced digital avionics would evolve towards federated or distributed systems although some participants felt that the single central processor concept was still viable. In either case, problems associated with a common data bus were considered an area for A major concern was that the data bus would become a NASA study.

critical single-point failure element. A caution offered in the design of integrated digital systems was the need for an approach that would become outdated with the advent allow evolutionary change so as not to of new technology.

The consensus of the Workshop was that standards, unless evolved s naturally, would stifle innovative developments. However, a minority felt that standards in selected areas would be beneficial in future digital avionic systems. It was pointed out by one participant that the semiconductor industry was gradually standardizing component inter- that these standards should be adhered to in avionics design if faces and in- in order to take maximum advantage of developments in other possible be consensus was that any suggestions for standards should dustries The developed by the "Industry", using existing organizations or professional Societies.

Several areas, in addition to the data bus design previously identified by the Workshop for avionics component research mentioned, were the general feeling that work was needed in and development. It was displays, heat pipes or other means of extracting

the development of

replacement for the current a heat from the avionics compartment, and NASA It was also the consensus that attitude and attitude rate gyros.

in should not pursue product development, but should 'support basic research The consensus was that research and development on hig risk areas.

h by the government and any product improvement cannot effectively be done The attempt to do so would interfere with the free enterprise system.

for example, should not be ` development ofspecial purpose LSI chips, attempted by NASA.

Although the Workshop was oriented towards the use of advanced avionics design, several recommendations for electronic technology in that new navigation It was pointed out concept studies were suggested.

Positioning System (Satellite techniques such as Omega (VLF) or Global single navigation system, thereby eliminating the

Nav) could lead to a

proliferation of different navigation receivers in the `cockpit.

need<for a these systems can be used and data on the Some basic research on how accuracy that can be achieved would be beneficial to the manufacturers.

Another study that could be of immediate- benefit to the manufacturers is the development of a procedure to identify "infantile" failure with a greater success than attainable with current methods. An airframe manu- facturer indicated that up to 30% of the avionic components he received had to be returned for repair or replacement before the aircraft left w the factory. It was agreed that success in the development of a better procedure would result in a reduction in costs to the user.

There was some discussion concerning the worth of developing Category III capability for general aviation. The feeling was that Category III capability will not be a requirement for general aviation in the 1980s, and that even autoland may be beyond economic reality. The use of HUD for lowering general aviation landing minimums to Category II or Category II1 was also discussed. At least one member of the Workshop felt that NASA the use of HUD for general aviation. However, there did

should study

not appear to be general agreement with the need for this type of study.

Other recommendations concerned the development of an improved communications system, collision avoidance system, power plant or engine management systems, and an overall study to reduce the pilot workload.

The latter study received considerable, endorsement with an emphasis on defining the information that should be presented to the pilot and how it can be time-shared using a few basic displays.

Finally, there was some discussion concerning the cost of getting a new system certified by the FAA. FAA regulations,, although not intended to inhibitinnovation, put the burden of proof concerning safety of a new device on the originator of the device. The cost of proving the safety of the new concept, in some cases, has causedthe originator to stay, with existing but less efficient systems. It was suggested by one participant that NASA might be able to assist the introduction of these new devices by performing some of the tests required by the FAA for certification. Although this was an interesting recommendation, it did not .receive further discusssion'.

TRANSCRIPTION (Principal Portions) OF THE GENERAL AVIATION-ADVANCED AVIONICS SYSTEMS WORKSHOP AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY, SPONSORED BY NASA-AMES November 5-6, 1975 One of the more pleasant functions that I seem to have DEAN KAYS: as Dean of the School of Engineering is to welcome groups such as this to workshops, symposiums, programs, and conferences, all on behalf of the University and particularly, on behalf of the Stanford School of Engineering. Events such as this, and we have many of them, are just one of the several ways by which we attempt to keep ourselves involved. We take great pride in being one of the outstanding centers in the country in both electronics research, and in the production of very highly trained people in the electronics area.

What particularly interests me today is that you are here talking about general aviation avionics, and although Dan DeBra may want to contradict me, I can't recall any occasion in the past where general aviation has formed the subject of a conference on this campus, although I certainly do remember many, many dozens of conferences concerned with space navigation, radio physics, and numerous other problems associated with astronautics. Now 'I hope those days aren't totally gone, but in the meantime, I think we should all be happy to see attention being paid to some of the to a large problems a little nearer earth and of great concern body of the citizenry.

I promised; Dan that I wasn't going to talk to you for a long period of time and I wasn't going to do any more than welcome you here to the campus because I know you have a very very busy schedule, both today and tomorrow. We're delighted to have you here on the campus and trust that your stay is going to be both interesting and pro- ductive. Thank you 'very much.

Dallas Denery and DR. De BRA: Thank you very much for coming, - Bill.

I of course both add our welcome to you.

Now in the 'nature of what we're trying to do here, I thought maybe I might start by just telling a little story to illustrate a point.

In the Air Force, they've done quite a b'it of animal training over the years and it wasn't too many years ago that they discovered that they had two really extraordinary animals: a couple of racoons that just seemed to test way-off scale from anything they'd ever had before. One of them has a little kind of tiny tail but he had way, way out in a great big head and intellectually, he just was front. Eventually through the testing and some special training, they sent him out here to Stanford and he got his Ph.D in aero- nautics and went onto work in some of the Air Force laboratories and became extremely well known and respected for his technical evaluation of aircraft and their behavior. His buddy had a little (De BRA Cont) bit smaller head, but a great big bushy tail, and he just tested way-off scale on motor skills and they eventually sent him to flight school and eventually after becoming an excellent fighter and pilot, he went on to the test pilot school down at Edwards became one of the most respected test pilots. Well, the Air Force had a problem with an airplane and there were some difficulties.

The big-headed racoon was called in and he decided, after looking at the data, that he was sure this thing had never occurred in any kind of testing situation; there were no equations to describe the behavior, and that it really was going to require some kind of flight, so he requested a flight observation of the phenomenon in test.

At Edwards, and there quite by accident, he was pleasantly sur- prised to find that the test pilot assigned to this flight was his V ole buddy, the other racoon. So they went up, and sure enough, the airplane got in trOUble and they had to punch out and they floated down on their chutes, and got into the woods, got their stuff all put away where it could be picked uplater, and started to walk their way out. Zap! they both stepped into a trap almost simultaneously. The big headed racoon kind of looked the situation If over and said to his buddy, "You know, we're in real trouble the hunters come back and find us in these traps, we're going to we're going to the wall. There's just no way end up as skins on for some explain our way out of these things.> It really calls special action." So ne leaned over and chewed off his paw and said, "Come on, we better get going," and he started to hop down the trail. Pretty soon he noticed that his buddy wasn't with him, so he turned around and went back and sure enough, here was his buddy on his face. And he said, "What's the matter?

with a long, sad look solution to the problem." The other racoon kind of I showed you a- "Well, it may have worked for you, but shook his head and said, I've chewed off three paws already and I'm still locked in."

There's some basic problems with a technology transfer, and what we wanted to emphasize here was that this is not an audience; that each audience, but rather, of you will not be giving a presentation to an we're a group of specialists from a fairly heterogeneous- background;

could be applied to general

that the technology that each of you know the

It isn't going to transfer without difficulties along

aviation way, and these _pet ideas of how one can take a little piece of tech- should be challenged. I

nology and put it into general aviation

think you'll find that the group here is, both very constructive in their attitude toward seeing that new technology moves into the area, and is going to have some concerns about how that gets done and

whether it can be done effectively. And so what we're trying to

do here is to get you to get your own thoughts out, to make them and also to get them aired available for other peoples' thinking, some constructive comments that may with a group that can give you about some of these things.

even change your own attitudes What we've scheduled here is about 10 minutes of discussions after these talks that have been scheduled for the first part of the morning. During that 10-minute period, we'd like you to feel as if you're making as much of a contribution as the person who was asked to make the preliminary comments.

We expect these proceedings to be available some time by early February, 1976, and the uncertainty at this time, of course, depends a little bit in the cooperation that we get. We may come back to ' you for clarification of the things that have been said during the course of the Workshop. Because the numbers got a little larger than we originally intended, we had hoped originally to be able to go around the room and ask each person to introduce themselves; we've decided that that would take a little too much time, so we hope that during the coffee break you'll continue with what was going before we started namely, of introducing yourselves to each other and getting to know each other well.

I certainly want to thank you all for coming, and your cooperation, and to each of you for helping us put together anagenda which I hope will be not only interesting while you're here, but useful.

DR. DENERY: Before we get on with the Workshop, I would like to make a few comments concerning the NASA General Aviation-Advanced Avionics Systems Program in order to put the Workshop into proper perspective and p erhaps provide a little better definition of its purpose. The objective of the General Aviation-Advanced Avionics Systems Program is to provide information that would be useful for the design of low-cost advanced avionics suitable for general aviation in the 1980's and the 1990's. We are not talking about today's systems, but are trying to Took ahead to tomorrow's needs.

The intent is to Took at both functional capabilities such as new and novel techniques for navigation, flight control, and powerplant management, as well as ways of implementing these functions into avionics hardware--the emphasis in the latter being on the utiliza- tion of new technology and systems integration. The approach that we're taking to accomplish these objectives is shown in Fig. 1, The first step represents an attempt to forecast what the environment's going to be within which general aviation will have to operate in the next 10 to 20 years. It is an attempt to estimate what the National Air Space System is going to be like, and specifically, what avionics requirements are going to be imposed on the general aviation pilot as a result of that system, The second step is an electronics forecast. The intent is to try to assess the trends in electronic technology over the next 10 to 2`0 years in the areas of sensors displays, processors, and actuators, to determine which of these, if any, will offer significant benefit to the general aviation pilot.

FORECAST ATC ENVIRONMENT FORECAST ELECTRONICS TECH: SUBSYSTEM CONCEPT STUDIES AVIONIC COMPONENTS R &D DESIGN & EVAL. SIN FLIGHT) TOTAL AVIONICS SYSTEM AVIONIC STANDARDS co COST-BENEFITS-ANALYSIS PRELIMINARY SYSTEM DESIGN FINAL SYSTEM SPEC FINAL SYSTEM DESIGN SYSTEM-FABRICATION SIMULATOR EVALUATION ENG. FH EVALUATION GUEST PILOT FLIGHT EVAL@ (Denery Cont) The third step is a series of subsystem concept studies. The idea here is to look at new and novel techniques for navigation, flight control, and powerplant management. Work is currently ongoing in that area, both at NASA--Ames and at NASA-Langley. Figure 2, which I will discuss later, indicates what work is presently going on at Ames and Langley. Any questions concerning work ongoing at Ames can be addressed to me. Questions concerning work ongoing at Langley should be addressed to Jack Reid, who is responsible for the general aviation work going on at the Langley Research Center.

The fourth step is an attempt to develop or evaluate electronic components that could have application to general aviation. Right now, we do not have any work identified in this particular area.

Hopefully, one of the outcomes of this Workshop will be an assess- ment of what, if anything, NASA should be doing in avionics compo- nents R&D.

Finally, we get down to the heart of the program which is the design and evaluation of concepts that could lead to a total avionics package for general aviation. The emphasis here is in demonstration of new technology and systems integration. There are several sub steps that we will be considering in this part of the program: First, we will be addressing the question of the desirability of _having some sort of industry controlled standards. The standards considered will range the full gamut--anywhere from cockpit panel layout to data format. We will also be conducting a cost-benefits analysis. The intent is to monitor the tradeoffs between system cost, maintainability, reliability, and other factors that will influence the eventual use by general aviation of the concepts being considered.

We have just, within the last week, released an RFP for the design of a candidate avionics system for general aviation - a total in- tegrated system. This RFP is for a design and not for hardware fabrication. It will be done under contract and could result in more than one contract if more thanone promising concept is pro- posed. The intent is to solicit ideas from outside sources for the design of general aviation advanced digital avionics systems.

The results of these earlier steps 'will go into specifying a final system in 1978, which we will then have designed and built. The final system design will incorporate as many concepts that warrant further evaluation as possible. The system will then be built, installed in a simulator for further evaluation, and eventually installed in a Cessna 4028 aircraft in order to gain some experience with the hardware concepts that have been proposed, and with the functional capabilities that have been evaluated. The flight 'evalu- ation will include a guest pilot evaluation during `which pilots from different segments of the general aviation community, both private and corporate, will be invited to participate and to look at some of the pilot system interface questions.

_9

SUBSYSTEM CONCEPT STUDIES

AMES

- GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION

FLIGHT CONTROLS UTILIZING LOW-COST SENSORS

POWERPLANT MANAGEMENT

LANGLEY

FLUIDICS

STALL WAR14I NG SENSORS

NAVIGATION -(OMEGA)

- FLAT PANEL IFR DISPLAY AID -

-

ANTENNA DESIGN

FIGURE 2

(Denery Cont) I would now like to go to Fig. 2 which, as I mentioned previously, will give a breakdown of the subsystem concept studies currently on- going at Ames and Langley. At Ames we have a program ongoing in guidance and navigation systems for general aviation. That program is presently based on the use of multiple VOR and DME information using frequency scanning techniques, but will be expanded to include other aids in the near future. We have also initiated a program in flight controls utilizing low-cost sensors. This study will involve both inhouse and contractual work. We are in the process of negotiat- ing a contract with Stanford University to continue some work that they had already initiated in this area. Finally, we plan to initiate a program in powerplant management, including diagostic testing of engines, emission control, fuel efficiency, and automation or consolidation of some of the manual ppntrols. As shown, Langley has programs ongoing in the use of fluid^:cs for flight control sys- tems, the development of stall warning sensors, the use of Omega for navigation, the use of a flat panel display as an IFR display, and basic antenna design.

So with that, I'd like to get on with the Workshop. Any questions concerning the work being done at Ames or Langley may be addressed to either myself or Jack Reid.

Dallas, who is doing the ATC environment study?

QUESTION: DR. DENERY: Aerospace Systems Inc. has been awarded that contract. The start date was November 24, 1975. Honeywell is doing the electronics technology study.

MR. GORHAM: Just one other point, and this may be something still on your program. You've got guest pilot flight evaluation. I hope that there is a whole regular series of guest pilot evaluations, right from the beginning.

DR. DENERY Yes, we do have the Cessna 402 aircraft which will be used for flight testing of various subsystem concepts, and we will be bringing in guest pilots throughout the program.

OR. DeBRA: To get things started, we have two different points of view to give us an overview to start. The first of these will be the airframe manufacturer's point of view, Paul Vanden Berge representing Cessna.

OVERVIEW AIRFRAME MANUFACTURE R VANDE14 BERGE: General aviation avionics is, without a doubt, the broadest, most complex subject that can be discussed relative to avionic systems.

Due to the wide variation in types of aircraft and in price range in the g eneral aviation market, avionics suppliers are required to

it

(Vanden Berge Cont) produce systems compatible with the $8000 small aircraft flown for fun on the weekends by the local butcher, as well as systems for the $3,000,000 high performance jets that are owned and operated by the billion-dollar corporations.

To add to the complexity of the situation, general aviation is frequently the testing ground for new systems, components, and tech- niques. The general aviation market can normally respond more quickly to new technology and new systems than can the airlines or military due to our much higher production . rates and our faster new aircraft. Unfortunately, the cost of advanced response rates in our reach until it is systems in technology is sometimes out of refined into 'a product that can be produced in larger quantities way from the day when a general at reduced cost. We've come a long Com system and a superhomer aviation aircraft with a two-watt VHF was considered well equipped. Today, essentially all aircraft must fit into the same air traffic control system and be equipped to meet the requirements of that air traffic control system. The FAA, with the help of Congress, has pushed us along in the interest of safety and control from the ground. Let's take a quick look at the types of systems most commonly used in general aviation today.

is shown some systems to communicate with the ground which in- First clude VHF, HF, transponders, altitude reporting and electronic locator transmitters to assist rescue operations in locating a downed air- craft. All of these systems, with the exception of HF, are required on most flights in the U.S. today.

on -board _are, according to the regulations, those NAV systems required commensurate with your intended_ flight. T,he systems installed on given airplane, however, will depend completely on how and where any the owner intends to use that aircraft. VOR,',localizer, glide-slope, and marker beacon are, of course, the most common systems used your location domestically. DME provides a lot more information about is required on flights above certain altitudes.

and VOR,DME,or the VORTAC system is not ADF is commonly used where the well established. VLF and Omega are relatively new systems to general aviation that provide long range navigation data from a few have great hopes that VLF and Omega ground based transmitters. We

of navi-

some time in the future allow us to reduce the quantity will -board these aircraft: gation systems required on Inertial and Doppler systems are self- contained and are very useful for long range navigation, especially over the ocean where you're is of range of most other NAV aids Microwave landing system out the ILS of the future and currently under development although there are systems being installed in general aviation today. I would few list of NAV systems include weather radar and radar altimeter in the intended for special commonly used in general aviation since they're purpose navigation such as flying through or around storms or on approach.

(VANDEN BERGE Cont) An assortment of other systems are commonly used to take data from the NAV systems and massage it in such a manner that it will control the aircraft and display information to the pilot in a convenient manner to reduce his work load: autopilot, flight director, RNAV/ VNAV, RMI, GPWS, and map plotters. This certainly is not a complete list of avionics systems available today, but I've tried to include those that are most frequently used in the general aviation aircraft.

Now, let's take a look at a few typical avionics packages.

I've tried to isolate segments of the general aviation market by price, weight, and type of avionic systems normally installed. The first segment is the $15,000 to $25,000 aircraft such as the Cessna 172 (Fig 3). This category of aircraft is normally used for training and VFR flight, and the typical package will include a single NAV, a single COM, ADF, transponder, and audio system. If

the aircraft will be used for IFR flight or instrument training as

many of this class are, the second NAV/COM, a glide slope, marker beacon, DME, altitude reporting, a single axis autopilot (a wings- leveler type of autopilot), and a locator beacon are added. Look what happens to the price on the well-equipped airplane: $15,000 is nearly equal to the price of the aircraft. And 68 lbs of weight will often mean an hour's less range if all the seats are filled.

Here is shown the $40,000 to $70,000 aircraft such as the Cessna 210 (Fig 4). I think many of the high performance single engine

airplanes fit into this category--most with retractable gear. A

typical package would include dual NAV/COM, ADF, glide slope

marker, transponder, again the single-axis autopilot, audio and the locator beacon, for around $11,000 and 65 lbs of weight. Now

in addition tothat, on the well equipped packages, we have added

the DME, RNAV, HST, a two-axis autopilot which gives you the pitch

control and altitude reporting. The package has gone up to 128°

lbs of weight then, and that's. for a single engine aircraft.

Next we show, in the $70,000 to $130,000 category such as the Cessna 310 (Fig 5), have about the same package, dual NAV/COMs,

we

ADF, etc., although the well equipped airplane will normally get a better quality of radio equipment. It's a step-up in the quality and some of the features and performance that are available in the equipment. This category will include an RNAV, generally some type

of flight director, and a small radar system. The flight director

basic

that goes in this _kind of aircraft will generally be the most

displays.

type of system integrated with the autopilot and using 3"

for the

However, they work well and provide a lot of information

convenience of the pilot. Only in the last five or six years has

an integrated flight director and autopilot system been available in the $8,000 to $15,000 price range--within the reach of most large single and light twin owners:

PACKAGE

AVIONICS

$15,000 - $25,000 AIRCRAFT

[CESSNA 112 SKYHAWK)

t a x

T

YPICAL PRICE = $5,000 WT = 27 lBS

NAV/COM TRANSPONDER

ADF

AUDIO

WELL

EQUIPPED PRICE = $15,000 WT = 68 CBS

ADD - NAV/COM

DME

GS

REPORTING

AUTOPILOT (1 AXIS)

MB

ELT

FIGURE 3 AVIONICS PACKAGE

$40,000 - $70,000 A11MR AFT

(CESSNA 210 CEINTUR10:1) TYPICAL PRICE = $11,000 WT = 65 LBS TRANSPONDER DUAL NAV/COM ADF AUTOPILOT (1 AXIS) GS AUDIO MB ELT WELL EQUIPPED PRICE $29,000 WT = 128 LBS AUTOPILOT (2 AXIS) ADD DME RNAV REPORTING HSI: FIGURE 4 AVIONICS PACKAGE $70,000 $130,000 All"ORAFT (CESSNA 310) TYPICAL PRICE = $23,000 WT = 113 LBS DUAL NAV/COM TRANSPONDER REPORTING ADF GS ELT MB AUDIO DME AUTOPILOT (2 AXIS EQUIPPED PRICE = $41,000' WT = 160 LBS ADD: DUAL NAV/COM +! FLIGHT DIRECTOR ADF + RADAR RNAV FIGURE 5

AVIONICS PACKAGE

AIRCRAFT

$150,000 — b300,000

421)

[CESSNA

WT = 163 IBS

TYPICAL PRICE = $43 1 000

DUAL NAV/COM TRANSPONDER

REPORTING

ADF

RADAR

GS

MB AUDIO

DME AUTOPILOT (2 AXIS)

RNAV FLIGHT DIRECTOR

WT = 260 LBS

^6LEL,L EQULUEn PRICE $81,000

TRANSPONDER

4DD: DUAL COM + 2nd

DUAL NAV + 2nd

GLIDE SLOPE

ADF + RMI

RADAR +

10 TELEPHONE RAD

AUTOPILOT + ALT.

ALERTING

FLT. DIR. +

FIGURE 6 (VANDEN'BERGE Cont) Here is the $150,000 to $300,000 class of airplanes which includes the medium to heavy pressurized twins--most commonly owned by corpora- of airplane tions for executive transportation (Fig. 6). This class is normally well equipped but notice the weight, especially for a very complete package. The well equipped prices and weights there reflect the weight and cost of remote avionics systems, about $81,000 and 260 lbs of weight.

Finally, in the price categories, is the half-million to two-million dollar aircraft such as the Cessna Citation (Fig. 7). This equipment covers the turboprops and most of the business jets. This is all top quality avionics and the package will vary widely depending on the of the aircraft. The well equipped airplane has intended use $210,000 worth of avionics in it at 480 lbs, including dual flight directors, a second transponder, and a second DME. Some aircraft get dual VLF systems, an inertial system, Doppler, or very will sophisticated RNAVs if intercontinental flights are to be common.

Prices of the avionics can hit half a million with the weight of the package being well over 600 lbs.

All avionics systems and installations are bothered by many of the same problems. Reliability is probably the No. l weakness that needs attention. The more expensive systems used in the higher priced aircraft are generally more reliable than the ones used on the smaller aircraft. However, the larger aircraft needs so many more systems and more complex systems that the failure rate of the avionics package on the larger aircraft is equal to or greater than that on the small aircraft. Avionics maintenance is one of the most signifi- cant costs of aircraft ownership,.

We have got to find a way to improve the reliability of avionics systems and installation. I believe a lot can be done with component and packaging technology. If we need a goal for improvement, I think that we should shootfor an individual systemMTBF of 10,000 hours. Many of the systems in use today are experiencing less than 1,000 hours meantime between failures. Improved reliability would not only result i'n a reduction of maintenance costs; it would reduce the quantity of systems that would be required on an aircraft.

In many cases, the technology for the improved reliability is avail-

able but not within the price range of general aviation. I suspect

to forfeit any new system the general aviation market may be willing for developments the next five years if the avionics industry could, of today's systems by a factor' in that time, improve the reliability of 3 to 5.

Heat, by itself, would not be of much concern except for its tremen- dous effect on reliability. We were all glad to see the demise of the vacuum tubes, with the red hot filaments, and the "inherently reliabile solid state devices" come on the scene. But that led to much denser packaging, and with lots of encouragement from the air- -craft manufacturers to smaller boxes. I'll bet the thermal density

AVIONICS PACKAGE

AIRCRAFT

$500,000 - $2,000,000

(CESSNA CITATION)

WT = 340 LBS

TYPICAL PRICE _ $140,000

DUAL COM

TRANSPONDER

DUAL NAV REPORTING/ALERTING

AUTOPILOT (3 AXIS)

DUAL GS

FLT.. DIR.

DUAL MB

ADF ADC

RADAR DUAL RMI

RNAV

DME

DUAL AUDIO

W

O IPP^DI PRICE = $210,000 WT = 480

LBS

ADD: 2nd FLT..

DIR. RAD. ALT.

2nd TRANSPONDER

RADIO TELEPHONE

2nd DME

VLF

FIGURE 7 (VANDEN BERGE Cont) of the average Com system today is greater, than it was 20 years ago.

We must find the means either to generate less heat or get rid of it more efficiently. In the last two or three years, the awareness of this problem has increased considerably. Many companies have done some in -depth studies on reliability, primarily relating to tempera- ture. The installers are now giving it more attention, but a fan blowing air around the box will never produce the desired result.

Cost and weight have been previously discussed but deserve a lot of attention. Again, improved technology could attack both of these problems. Note what happened to the pocket calculators. Airplanes are built and sold to carry people and cargo efficiently. The weight of the avionics package reduces either the amount of cargo or people on the airplane, the aircraft performance, or its range. Aircraft manufacturers commonly spend thousands of dollars to increase the payload as little as five pounds.

Interference between systems exists to some degree on any airplane that's ever been built. A wandering course deviation pointer, and maybe a flag on -flow the NAV's when transmitting on the Com, fuel meters that go berserk when you key the HF, the ADF pointing at the A-C inverters, the autopilot disconnecting when the coffee pot is plugged in, and on and on. All these interferences and hundreds more have all been experienced at some time or another. Most of the interferences can be solved, at great expense. But when the only solution becomes a filter that occupies two cubic ft. and weighs 45 l bs , you find that you can live with your NAV needle jiggling a little once in a while. Any avionics R&D program must include a thorough evaluation of noise generated by the system and the system's sus- ceptibility to unwanted signals.

Panel space is at a premium on any 'aircraft. You'd think the larger aircraft wouldn't have this problem, but due to the greater number of systems required on the large birds, it is really more of a problem than in the small ones. In most cases, the human factor or aspects of a readable display and a controllor switch you can get your fingers on are the controlling factors on the panel unit size.

I think the only hope in this area lies with reducing the number of controls required rather than simply making them smaller. Hope- we talk fully we can get some further advice on this later today when about displays To summarize, I would suggest a large portion of the R&D funds avail- able throughout the avionics industry, and the government be dedicated to advancing technology for improved reliability. This improvement will provide the greatest value for the general aviation community, Second, we must be cautious of our tendency to rely too heavily on a "centralized computer." Some of the general purpose computers currently being.developed for aircraft have the capacity to handle the entire navigation requirement with capacity left over to perform numerous other functions such as fuel management, engine instrumen- tati.on, etc. We must be concerned with what happens when that (VANDEN BERGS Cont) computer fails, and leaves the pilot with more than a control wheel in his hand and a blank look on his face. Third, long range avionic system development should be directed towards replacing various types of NAV aids in use now with a single world-wide system. This would be a system that provides all the NAV information required in the cockpit and will get an airplane anywhere, anytime, and by any route the pilot chooses. It must handle precision approaches, as well as intercontinental flights. The navigation package in all aircraft would then consist of two or maybe three of these world- wide systems.

I appreciate the opportunity to participate in a Workshop of this nature. It's one of the few opportunities we have to get together and collectively look ahead and figure out where we go from here. I think if we all pull in the same direction, we'll get there faster and at far less expense to any of us. Thank you.

De BRA: DR. Mr. Swearingen of Beech Aircraft will help us with the discussion.

MR. SWEARINGEN: There are a couple of additional things I want to point out. It was mentioned that the environment to which an aircraft is subjected to is quite harsh. Imagine the effects the avionic on system when an aircraft is parked out in the Southwestern desert for a day, sitting out in the sun with temperatures in the avionics com- And then all of a sudden subjecting partments area reaching 1800 .

them to the temperatures experienced when flown at higher altitudes.

It seems throughout the industry that these problems are continually haunting us but unfortunately this is the environment we have to sub- ject the avionics to, because we are not going to change the usage of the aircraft.

I'd like to amplify Paul's statement on weight and dollars spent.

Twenty to forty percent of the cost of the aircraft comes out of the cost of the avionics system, and as you say, people sometimes must' be left behind or fuel off-loaded, just to have these systems avail- able in the aircraft. Of course, this significantly limits the air- craft usability. When so many dollars have been committed to this aircraft it is quite difficult for the end 'user to tolerate these restrictions.

The other thing I'd like to amplify on is the work load that the pilot experiences when he flies from point A to point B. Most of the time

is spent with the communications system: the communications work load

is quite prohibitive along with the navigational workload. This is an area where we feel that something must be done to help the pilot.

From the manufacturer's point of view also, the work load required to manage avionics systems takes away from the time required by the pilot to monitor aircraft systems and perform his other flight duties.

(SWEARINGEN Cont) We also feel there needs to be some significant improvements in the pilot's ability to navigate from point A to point B. This is an area where we felt use of RNAV systems or inertial systems would greatly enhance his abilities but some of these systems are being used now and there are some restrictions imposed on the pilot's use of these systems. When we talk about selected RNAV routes, rather than just the ability to fly from point A to point B without unnecessary coordi- nation with the ground, this limits the use of the total capabilities of these systems.

I think also when we speak of the future, we need to speak about areas of display technology and control devices. The avionics systems and controls are in some instances, utilizing well over half the avail- able panel space in the aircraft. So we have to agree with Paul's list of areas where we need to employ greater technology and advance- ments.

Another area I'd like to mention is how the user requirements change for even one particular aircraft. The user may be flying into Washington National one day, and then out to Oshkosh or Cheyenne, Wyoming the next day, so he needs extreme versatility in his avionics systems and this versatility must be included by the manufacturers as far as implementation in the systems, and also the agencies dictating An area that I think the avionics requirements for particular Users.

we could use significant work in is a modular approach to avionics which gives the end user the ability for quick changes in his avionics to meet the requirements for a particular mission. Airframe manu- facturers are also confronted with significant problems since it is necessary to interface varieties of systems into the aircraft, since we're not always installing an all-King or all-Collins system.

We appreciate the opportunity to be here. We would like the oppor- tunity to make our inputs into the systems since we sometimes feel that we have these systems requirements almost jammed down our throats.

I'd like to leave the remainder of our time open to some points of

-discussion and I'd like to point out some good gentlemen to you to direct questions in this area: Mr., Jay Johnson and John Mucci from Beech Aircraft who are responsible for incorporating the avionics systems and design into our production aircraft.

Any questions for either speaker or any comments that you'd DR. De BRA: like to make in general? "- MR. SCHOENMAN: In these types of aircraft, cabin space is one factor that isn't going to expand to any great degree, and we all know that the number of functions seems to be growing and the only choices we are left with are: (1) to make the instruments themselves smaller, which (2) integra- is objectionable from the pilot's operational standpoint, tion of these functions to simplify the navigation system that's developed by the FAA. I would like to get your opinion on that.

MR. SWEARINGEN: I think electro-mechanical displays have been well inte- grated and I think we've reached a point there where perhaps we are overloading the pilot's capabilities. Timesharing of displays is an area of possible advancement. The displays would be devoted to the requirements for a particular flight segment and could be switched for different segments.

MR. VANDEN BERGE: That's very true. I agree we can't make anything smaller, but there's a lot of instruments on the panel that you don't need a continuous display from, and I think that those are the areas that need to be attacked by timesharing or some kind of a CRT type display that can show you anything you need but when a problem develops, display all the information relevant to that problem. Many functions don't require full-time displays. for instance the engine instrumentation is not something that is needed 100 percent of the time but it sure takes up a lot of panel space.

MR. ALBERTS: We did a study called the Integrated Information Presenta- tion and Control System with Boeing, in which we showed that a tacti- cal fighter or bombing mission could be performed as well with a single CRT as with two CRT's. It was a display by exception_ concept. Only those things that were changing that were needed for that phase of the mission were displayed. LSI and digital scan con- verters are making this a very feasible thing to do. I refer you to that particular study because it was well done; it was flown by test pilots and had pilot acceptance which is very important.

I wonder if we'll .... we'll take an opportunity to get some DR. De BRA: of these comments as we do, but I would rather keep to the schedule if we could right now. We now have the avionics manufacturers' point of view. Jerry Farrar of King Radio will give the first talk and then the subject will be taken up by George Lucchi of RCA.

OVERVIEW: AVIONICS MANUFACTURER MR. FARRAR: The first thing that I would like to talk to you about is the constraints under which we as avionics manufacturers must operate.

The most dominating constraint is the free enterprise system in which we all live and do business. If our company's goal is anything less than offering avionics with the maximum utilization and reliability, at the lowest cost, then we won't be in business very long-.

The maximum utilization is fixed by product definition. It is up to us to configure our products so that they perform 100% of the intended functions while minimizing the necessary pilot interfaces. We feel gimmick features are not acceptable in avionics.. They increase the cost of the equipment, reduce its; reliability, and we feel, reduce it's salability, since pilots know which features are useful and which are not.

(FARRAR Cont) Maximizing reliability while minimizing cost is the most challenging engineering task we have. We definitely can't use Mil-Spec components and minimize cost. Therefore, we design with commercial grade com- ponents and derate them in our designs to increase their reliability.

Smart or ingenious engineering designs are the best way to obtain reliability and low cost. The engineer who can design a circuit, a unit, or a system that satisfies the specified requirements with the fewest number of parts has, at the same time, maximized the reliability and minimized the cost.

Labor is a large part of the cost in avionics. In fact the costs of assembly and testing a piece of avionics equipment are usually a greater percentage of the total manufacturing cost than is the cost of the components. It therefore falls on the Engineering Department to design radios that are straightforward in construction and with more than adequate tolerance limits. The unit that is built in the shortest time, with the fewest errors that must later be found, is the unit that is the most reliable and that can be sold for the low-

est cost. Testing a piece of avionics equipment is time consuming

and expensive, because it requires complicated test equipment and a high grade of technician. The engineer who designs a radio with the minimum number of test adjustments and with the most repeatable characteristics is the best man for our industry.

Operating temperature is the greatest factor in avionics reliability.

From all the data we have been able to gather, on the average, a com-

ponent that is operating in

an ambient temperature of 65% will have

a failure rate 50 times greater than if it were operating at 25°C.

That number goes to 500 times if the component is operating at 85'C.

Therefore, it again falls on the Engineering Department to design

equipment that operates cool, not only as a unit by itself, but also

when installed in an aircraft with a full avionics system.

Ease of installation is also a-very important aspect of avionics

engineering. It is who uses

a sales feature in that the distributor

will

less of his profit to install a piece of avionics equipment sell it harder. It is a reliability factor because if it is easy to install there i,s less chance of an error that can later cause problems.

I can summarize all these constraints in the following way. Engineer-

ing for Engineering's sake only is not 'acceptable in a commercial

avionics company. Engineering for a product has to be our goal.

-I was asked to comment on what factors cause avionics boxes to cosh

as much as they do. About

two weeks, ago I received a letter from a'

a

young man attending college in Florida. He was giving a paper on

grand scheme he has using a television screen in an aircraft to per- form multiple functions in the cockpit including a major portion of

the air traffic control_ problem. His ideas were reasonable except

(FARRAR Cont) for the last sentence in his paper. It said, "I feel this system could sell for between $50 and $100 because anybody can buy a black and white television for that price today. I think there is probably a good comparison to be made here. Why does avionics cost approximately 10 times more than a black and white television?

The first factor would be the increased complexity of avionics over a black and white television. The amount will depend on which piece of avionics equipment you are comparing, but on the average, avionics are more complex than a television.

Quantity sold is the next factor. A black and white television manufacturer will probably build 1,000 sets per day on his line while our quantities run from l to 50 depending on the line. Since their quantity is so high, their parts cost are very low. They can also use a lesser grade of component since the operating environment of a television is a constant room temperature. They are also able to highly tool their products due to quantity, which keeps the mechani- cal piece part cost low. Again, because of quantity, they can afford to use highly automated equipment on their production lines.

The higher discount structure to the avionics distributor is yet another factor. This higher discount structure is necessary to cover the cost of installation, the lower sales volume he has, and the cost.

of the required and expensive specialized test equipment he must have to satisfy his warranty obligations. Also in most cases when a customer buys a piece of avionics he gets everything he needs for a working system. That is, the antenna, connector, etc. He doesn't get these when he buys a television: Warranty costs are higher for avionics. Not only is specialized test equipment necessary, but a higher grade of technicians is required.

This raises the cost of warranty labor to between $16 and $20 per hour.

Factory overhead is a very large cost in avionics. While the tele- vision manufacturer will probably have 3 lines running which produce 1,000 units a day; our factory has 125 lines that produce from 1 to 50 units a day. The supporting functions necessary to keep 125 separate lines running is tremendous.

The large -amount of engineering expenditures per unit sold also increases the cost of avionics. Last year 7 1j4% of our total sales dollars went back into engineering. This i-s necessary due to the intense competitive'pressures in the avionics market, and the fast evolving state-of-the-art of our industry.

The final factor is due to federal requi-rements. These requirements, Which are necessary to insure safety of flight, not only impact the complexity of the basic Units themselves, but also dictate that our manufacturing process, quality control, and configuration control must meet the Federal Aviation Regulations.

(FARRAR Cont) Considering all these factors, the only answer I have is that avionics will continue to cost more than a television, and I do not see any change in this situation in the future. The question could then be asked, "What does the pilot of a small aircraft give up when he buys the lowest cost avionics?"

of this is the The first is operational flexibility. An example These units usually share one receiver for both lower cost NAV/£OMs.

the navigation function and the communication transceiver which means that only one of the two functions are available to the pilot at any one time. This is an acceptable sacrifice in many cases since the aircraft owner can save $1,000 or more on the purchase cost of the shared receiver NAV/COMs.

Manual operation of functions versus automatic is another tradeoff in the lower cost units, but in the cockpit of an aircraft where the work load is small this again is an acceptable sacrifice for the savings in cost.

Receiver selectivity is often reduced in the lower cost units. This reduction of selectivity is only to the point of operational accept- ability and does not in anyway jeopordize safety of flight.

when buying the Reliability is one thing the pilot does not give us lower cost avionics. We use the same grade of components and the same care in construction and testing of the low cost units that we do in the high price units. Because of this and because of the fewer give the owner reliability number of parts, the low cost units will equal to, or greater than, the more complicated systems.

The final question would be, "Does the Owner give up safety of flight when he buys the lower cost units?" Our answer is NO. In fact, we feel that by offering low cost units we increase his safety because and functions that would otherwise be too he can now afford equipment expensive for his aircraft.

Finally, I was asked to comment on how avionics will evolve in the any prediction, a look at past history is probably future. As with King Radio the best starting point. The first _product ever sold by Corporation was a KY 90 communication transceiver. The KY 90 and 90 supply and channel crystal-controlled unit that had a remote power sold for $995 i •n 1960. The designwas all tubes except for germanium and audio amplifier. The components transistors in the _power supply side of the chassis.

were hand wired from point to point on the bottom A product King presently produces is the KX 145 with the associated KI 205 indicator. This is a shared receiver NAV/COM system and pro- vides the pilot with 720 communication channels or 200 navigation channels complete with its own NAV converter. It is totally solid boards circuit state and ail of -the components are mounted on printed that are wave soldered. This unit sells for $895 today. When you consider inflation, the old KY 90's price today would be $1,885. So you can see the KX 145 offers the pilot more than three times the functional capabilities at approximately one half the cost. This will give you an idea of how far avionics has come in the last 15 years. The per function cost to the aircraft owner today is 1/6 of what it was in 1960.

In the future, we

feel this reduction in cost per function will con- tinue giving the aircraft owner even more capabilities for less dollars spent. Factors that will continue this trend are new com- ponents such as microprocessors, higher frequency semiconductors,

and large-scale integrated circuits, new materials such as

poly- sulfoam for components and mechanical piece parts new transducer techniques for measuring physical properties, new manufacturing tech- niques to reduce labor and, above all, the free enterprise system that keeps us all lean.

We in the avionics industry are proud of our record and we feel that we are only one step behind the state-of-the-art. Thank you.

MR. LUCCHI: I would like to make a couple of comments having to do with integrated displays in the cockpit. I think that is something NASA should take a good look at because it can reduce space in the panel and there are techniques today (for which the costs are coming down) using digital technology and scan converters where a decent display can be presented for most of the navigation functions in one inte- grated display. If necessary, a dual display could be used for redundancy and reliability. We have developed radars in the past with multi-function displays. They have not been successful yet because of cost and FAA requirement, because they did have other displays as backup. But we did provide a TV capability on radar displays and we could show Loran.

When you can show TV on a display, you can now di-s-

play complete characteristics whenever you want. So we're not limited by the technology and I don't think the price is out of line today.

I agree fully with Jerry's comments. It's very hard for me to expand on what he said because he hit it right on that the cost of low

avionics today are just as reliable as high cost items. High cost

items have more functions and more test functions. Some of our equip-

ment

in the past had self -tests built into them which actually degraded

the reliabilit of the system and really y y yprovided very minimal return

on that investment and cost. Complexity was increased so the cost went

up, and reliability went down because of the number of functions that were required in that box. So I think self-test is another area we should look into. I think if avionics are designed correctly, the self-

not needed in

test modes are flight. They may be useful in the lab or

in the repair facility, but the self -test features should be designed on the bench and not in the equipment in the interest of reliability and cost.

This challenges with the engineer who must operate in a competitive low cost, high performing piece of avionics environment and design a equipment in a very low production environment. That's why the cost is high. Somehow we've got to get the production costs down and the production economy up: DR. NOYCE: What do you figure it costs to have that CRT with the radar display in the cockpit?

is already here. Our radars today have the capability M R. LUCCHI: The CRT of displaying alpha numerics and we can add a TV feature to it for about $500.

DR, NOYCE: So if you're going to put anything else on there, it's simply the cost of the electronics interface.

We use a standard TV format. About that $500 price; we don't MR. LUCCHI: mean list price. This is what we would sell it for now, net, so far.

List price would be maybe 1.6 times that amount depending on discount.

MR. MUCCI: Is there any research done into the possibility of integrat- ing_flight director systems with CRTs, using the radar displays already the aircraft on a time-shared basis.

in MR. GORHAM: I disagree completely. The flight director is an instrument that we perhaps need to simplify, but timesharing benefits in the cockpit (aside from the navigation function) is increased mainly for the systems which only need to be looked at when they go wrong, such as fuel and thrust management and some other factors which don't change rapidly.

MR. LUCCHI: As I said before the technology is here. There are CRT flight conver- directors in the military today and we do have digital scan ters that can provide that function. It's a matter of priorities It's not a tech- and the question of whether timesharing is useful.

nology problem.

With all this discussion of avionics, I'm struck by the lack MR. FOY: of comments about false checking, redundancy and failure, warning of these units. I'm thinking of the instances where somebody has made a flight and gone in for a landing, only to find that his glide-slope not even connected. Why don't you worry about this sort indicator was of thing using the existing package?

Well there are flag's that warn of this.

MR. LUCCHI: MR.`FOY That's a visual function.

MR. VANDEN BERGE: Another thing to be concerned with is on many of the smaller planes, you don't have two glide slopes to check against.

So I think we have to rely on the fact that there are other cues in the cockpit that the pilot has to check against; is his glide slope_ working relative to his altimeter, for example. A pilot can check it against other cues rather than the automated monitoring system.

MR. GORHAM: Let me tell a short story about a test. This is about a certain manufacturer's autopilot, a one-box system that had a very poor record of fault found which most of the autopilots used to have and every time the box was pulled it would squawk and 80% of the time there would be no fault found with the box and it would be put back. Even today our general record is about 60% no fault found.

One of the reasons was that it was a one-box system that was near the door, so when the client came in,the guy said "autopilot fault, pull the box." Now the way this airline solved this was to put the box further down inside the airplane and weld it into the racks. And they put a built-iii test box in and this had a little lamp and a little button that said "Push to see the health of the autopilot computer." There was nothing inside the box except for a small battery and the lamp, so when the button was pushed the lamp lit.

Any time there was an autopilot problem, the pilot would push the button and the light would say "it's OV so he'd look for the fault somewhere else and they improved the finances of autopilot opera- tion considerably this way.

MR. OSDER: There is a contradiction in the remark concerning the elimi- nation of a lot of the built-in self -test capability. We then have .

the problem of people pulling the wrong box . We did learn a long time ago even in the 1950's, that reliability was directly pro- portional to inaccessibility of the equipment. Calculations were done, for example, that showed that some of the electro-mechanical or electro-hydraulic servo mechanisms were less reliable than the electronics. But in records it turns out that they were never removed because you'd have to climb up into the tail and get your- self dirty and nobody pulled them. The problem was that this is a integrated system with many elements interacting with each other.

In order to diagnose which element of the system was bad, very com- plex self-test mechanisms were incorporated into the system. So that you pulled the electronic box, rather than pull the electro-hydrau-

lic servo parts, for instance. But the net result was complex built-

in test equipment that deteriorated the reliability of the equipment.

MR. LUCCHI: Another problem is that the airlines generally have people who are trained and who do maintenance at one facility. Generally, this is not true in general aviation; we have to design a little bit better box for maintainability in general aviation. You can't guarantee the same level of skill for maintenance.

I think what Jerry was pointing out was that the lower price equip- ment have less packed in them and fewer functions and the number of

parts in direct proportion to the reliability. One way to get reli-

ability is by having fewer functions, less complexity, and wider tolerances. Potentially, reliability for a small simple system is considerably higher than the large integrated systems with many functions.

MR. SCHOENMAN: In the commercial aircraft industry market, we've found one thing that's rather interesting: the reliability of autopilots, for instance, hasn't changed much in the last 15 years. The increase in number of functions has about been equal to the improvement in reliability. So for instance, an autopilot today can get about two or three hundred hours MTBF. That's about what we got 15 years ago.

But of course the number of functions performed has been maybe as many as five times increased. We seem That seems to be a trend.

to increase the number of functions to match what people can stand in terms of reliability.

MR. VANDEN BERGE: We've talked about reliability a lot, there is one

problem we really haven't addressed; that is, we have very little

ability to get good reliability data from the field. In the general aviation airplane it's not a controlled situation; therefore, when we figure mean time between failures we're normally guessing at the operating hours. It's not accurate data as you can get from the air- line operations that monitor it very closely.

MR. LUCCHI: Paul the airline industry is not quite that good either rate, even today, because they have a very high, unscheduled removal according to people at the organized manufacturer's conference.

De BRA: We want to start now to talk a little bit about the sources DR.

of technology that might be carried over into general aviation. The automotive industry will be a source of technology because of the cost for certain kinds of components and Frank Jaumot is going to give us a little overture on that. Frank is with De-lco--GM.

SOURCES OF APPLICABLE TECHNOLOGY AND SYSTEM ARCHITECTURES: AUTO INDUSTRY

a supplier of

DR. JAUMOT: I would like to point out that since Delco is avionics, of computers for commercial and industrial use, and of high voltage electronic systems and solid state components, I want to keep hat straight today. I'm to talk only about automotive electronic

my

systems. Great strides have been made in the developmrnt of solid state devices, particularly in large-scale integration. These have made it possible to perform very complex signal processing functions

at relatively low cost. Perhaps more important;, primarily through

reduction of interconnections, reliability promises to be greatly (JAUMOT Cont) improved. Thus, we have the first step toward extensive use of electronic controls in the automobile. I say the first step advisedly because there is a lot more to an automotive electronic system than signal processing electronics. In fact, the most seri- ous problems in all three of the important aspects of an automobile

system --performance, reliability and cost--do not lie in the basic

electronics. That is basically what I've heard here this morning about general aviation Figure 8 is an over-simplified representation of an automotive electronic system, or any system for that matter. Note that, since a transducer is anything that transforms one kind of energy into another, each of the boxes, except the information processing, can be said to be transducers. This is where most of our problems are.

For the purpose of our discussion today, we can dismiss manual

commands since these usually are simple switches or keyboards. Each of the remaining boxes present certain challenges in the automotive

applications and I would like to take a look at them in more or less

increasing order of the difficulties they present.

I need to enter a caveat. And that is, what I am about to say by no means represents complete agreement in the automotive industry, or even within GM for that matter.

First of all, let's consider the computer, or more properly the microcomputer, The automobile like any other application has specific requirements and these requirements

can be met in a number of ways. However, we

decided that the most cost effective and flexible system architec-

ture, particularly with regard to future expansion, was a central

microprocessor with most of the work load--and particularly the

requirement for quite varied data gathering and output controllers

done by the input/output electronics.

Figure 9 is just a slightly better picture of Fig. 8. This approach

does two basic things for us. First, it permits us to use the same processor over quite a range of control functions in applications

ranging from the simplest control functions that significant

require

signal processing to very elaborate systems that perform more than

30 functions Second, it permits us to implement in a more cost

effective way, the requirement that critical control systems fail soft"

as we say. That is, if the fuel control loop experiences a failure

in the electronics, we must still be able to provide fuel to the engine

so that the driver can at _least limp to the nearest repair station.

For those of you who are believers in distributed architecture, and I

have to admit this includes Delco's commercial avionics group, I need

to point out that once you have made the decision to go in the direc-

tion I indicated we favor, one finds that a relatively unsophisticated

INTEGRATED VEHICLE SYSTEM

ACTUA- SENSORS TORS VEHICLE

N

CONTROLS OPERATOR,DISPLAYS ELECTRONIC CONTROLLER WAUMOT Cont) microprocessor has more than enough computational capacity to do just about anything one wants to do. So, we would do better from the reli- ability standpoint to have redundant central processors. However, we don't even have to do that because we have positively imposed upon us this fail safe requirement which, at Least to a first approximation, does provide the redundancy.

To be a little more specific--once we admitted what everyone knows, that the major problem is the interface between the microprocessor hardware and the vehicle transducers, which to us meant custom inter- face chips--the microprocessor becomes almost a trivial item. So, for reasons of throughput, speed and expansion capability, we at Delco Electronics have chosen an 8-bit parallel machine approach. In case I have confused you with my remark about speed, since it means an entirely different thing to us than to a mainframe manufacturer, we find that an instruction cycle of four microseconds is good enough, although we prefer less.

More important, the memory and central processing unit with address and data bus structure are commercially available microprocessor hard- ware. There are any number of these devices available from many different manufacturers. They may each have their own sets of instruc- tions and various means of manipulating data but their use requires only a learning process on the part of the user.

We prefer to solve the interface problem I mentioned using a building block approach to configure the complete electronic system (Fig. 10).

We believe the set of building blocks we have established can be used to configure an electronic system tailored to solve almost any auto- motive control and display function.

The real solution to the interface problem, however, is the two other IC chips--which provide the interface building blocks--GM custom between the CPU and the transducers; that is, the interface with the Vehicle. Both of these are extremely complex LSI chips. One is a clock/multiplexer chip, which provides (i) the timing pulses needed to operate the other devices, (ii) a time of day function, and (iii) multiplexes 8 digits of data in a format compatible with segmented electronic displays. This is the interface to the vehicle instru- ment panel.

The other GM chip is an input/output device which receives and stores input data from sensors and transmits control signals to actuators.

This design wasmade as versatile as possible and, although it un- electronic control doubtedly will have to undergo detail redesign as holdup. In sum- applications progress, we believe the concept will

mary, this chip ,makes the data gathering function completely indepen-

dent and synchronous to the CPU operation. The output function is essentially the inverse process. By selection of the proper clock and enable-signals,, input data scaling and resolution can be varied MICROPROCESSOR CHIP SET 1 CPU CHIP MEMORY CHIPS 1 CLOCK/MUX CHIP ROM CONTROL OUTPUT DISPLAYS RAM 1 i SIGNAL INPUT ' ALU i OUTPUT BUFFERS ACTUATORS CONDITION L ---- ---^ INPUT/OUTPUT CHIPS (JAUMOT Cont) for different applications. Output events such as fuel injection or spark timing pulses can be performed slaved to the vehicle. In addition, pulse-width modulated output signals can be generated for controlling linear type servo actuators. Four discrete input or output signals for logical type controls or status indicators are also available. Two sets of inputs and outputs can be handled by

a single device, and as many as 8 devices can be interfaced to a

CPU. In fact, adding additional memory chips and additional inter- face chips permits even further expansion if needed. For example, we use a high speed 8-channel multiplexed analog-to-digital con- verter to interface existing low cost analog sensors.

Let me repeat the three considerations used in the design approach to the interface. One was to provide for a synchronous input and output control. Two was to include all calculator and logic func- tions in the software rather than the interface, and three was to utilize commonality in circuits for similar input and output signals.

We believe this interface results in a cost effective solution which

relieves the central processing unit of burdensome data gathering and output control and, in turn, allows a simple microprocessor to not only perform the functions, but provide for future expansion.

I didn't intend to talk that long on the computer but at least it gives me an excuse to cut down discussion on displays, which I don't like anyway.

The obvious objective of any display is to provide the vehicle opera-

tor with information that he needs or just wants. Certainly, this

needs to be done effectively and it is always wise to make them as

attractive as possible. For future automotive systems we are con- centrating on digital displays.

Apart from pizazz, there are three basic reasons for considering

digital displays. First, the application of digital signal pro-

cessing provides a source of data that has been collected and stored

in a digital format. It is only logical to make this information

available to the driver in digital displays.

Second, electronic digital displays are readily time shared to dis- play several functions with a single grouping of digits. This cap

ability enables simplicity in panel displays by eliminating the need

for adding a new gage for each 'function. That's another way of say-

ing that by sharing, you can reduce, somewhat, the cost penalty of

digital ,displays.

DR. SMYTH: Frank, are those alphanumeric or just numeric displays?

DR. JAUMOT: All of the ones I'll talk about this morning are numeric.

We do have one alphanumeric, but so far we can't afford it. The third reason for digital displays is design freedom. In addition to the obvious new freedom in physical interior design, certain provide as "goodies" can only

we would like to

display functions be made available with digital displays.

The types of displays that have received not only serious considera- tion but careful study and life and environmental testing are LEDs, gas discharge, electrochrome, incandescent and liquid crystal. So far none of these have proved to be entirely satisfactory when tested against automotive requirements for brightness, environment, multi- plexing, dimming, color filtering, etc.

To date, against these requirements, gas discharge displays are the most nearly acceptable with the new developments in brighter yellow and green LEDs improving their chances, particularly for certain display functions.

Since gas discharge displays seem to be preferred what are their problems? First, the high voltage

supply is costly and generate

emi which gives the radio fits. Second, a gas discharge display can be filtered to provide varied colors, but without going to the new high intensity displays which present power supply problems it is not bright enough for visibility against outdoor illumination. Third,

dimming is not

very satisfactory and, most important, our results as

to their survival in the automative environment hasn't been anything to write home about.

Another problem area often overlooked is the human factors area.

Digital processing techniques like hysteresis and averaging can eliminate flickering, but flickering has to be eliminated. Further, a 'variable response has to be incorporated in the display behavior that adapts to transient as well as steady state driving conditions.

Some functions, like a digital fuel gage, are normally filtered for

slow response. However, fast initialization when the key

is turned

on is a must. The point is, awareness of such requirements and

`implementation of appropriate techniques to meet 'them ` are essential to effective display systems.

Now to my favorite subject-- and

the automotive electronic systems

biggest burden--sensors and actuators

Input information is almost invariably analog and the output units

usoally want analog muscle. Since it is most desirable that the

data processing be done digitally, it would be nice if the sensors

provided digital data and actuators accepted it. In any event, _it is the transducers--a word I'll use to mean sensors and/or actuators --that determine the basic limitations of the system performance,

require the majority of effort in system development, and result

(JAUMOT Cont in the major part of the system cost. Trevor Jones of GM's Engineering Staff, in a recent paper, identified some 60 future electronic systems. Of these, 35 required major sensor develop- ments and 25 needed more effective actuators. Cost barriers, usually due to sensors or actuators, were present in 56 of the 60 applications. The signal processing electronics was considered a problem in only seven systems and four of these were automatic brake systems. That's why automotive people say the electronics are easy. It's the rest of the system that causes the trouble.

There are many transducers in today's cars. Also, a broad range of rugged and precise sensors have been developed for aerospace applications. So where are the problems?

Figure 11 shows the primary factors in any transducer application.

Obviously, I'll get arguments on this, but using automotive require- ments as a base, I think I can defend it.

What this figure says is that automotive electronic systems and especially transducers must have aerospace precision, industrial long term stability and reliability, commercial costs, and resistance to environmental conditions worthy of being included in Dante's neither world. I strongly suspect from what I have heard this morning that general aviation has very nearly the same require- ments as the automobile. As I mentioned there are many transducers used in today's cars and obviously they meet most of these criteria.

However, they tend to be relatively simple mechanical devices based on bellows, bi-metallic strips, fluid expansion, and so on. Outputs are typically analog and generally of a type not easily converted to a digital signal. The principal shortcoming is that they tend to be too slow in response time and lack the accuracy required for elec- tronic controls. In addition they lose their cost attractiveness if we attempt to digitize their outputs.

In order to meet the design objectives of an electronic system, transducers must be accurate--under all conditions--to +1% or at most +2%, and they must have much faster response than most devices used in cars today. Unless we can achieve these levels of precision, we tend to lose all advantages over existing mechanical systems and devices since an electronic approach really only offers better per- formance to offset the almost invariabl -e cost permi`um.

a number of transducers have been developed which pro- Of course, accept digital signals and which have the required perform- vide or ance for automotive electronics By and large they were developed for aerospace and, to a lesser degree,-special industrial applica- tions. But apart from performance, in general, these devices do not satisfy the other requirements. Since the production volumes involved are relatively small, designs to minimize fabrication and assembly labor or material cost were not needed. The costs of

ELECTRONIC SENSOR APPLICATIONS

PRIMARY FACTORS

PERFORMANCE RESISTANCE TO LOW LONG ENVIRONMENTAL (PRECISION $ RESPONSE) COST LIFE EXTREMES _ _

AEROSPACE X X

- -

INDUSTRIAL ? X

COMMERCIAL - X

X AUTOMOTIVE X X X WAUMOT Cont) developing, marketing, calibrating and inventorying dictated pricing much more than labor and material content. This is one attractive feature of the transducer market for automobiles; high volume requirements permit lower cost designs and spread fixed costs over a much larger number of parts. Further, and the dangers of over-generalizing aside, aerospace sensors while designed for moderately extreme environments are generally expected to have relatively short operating life and industrial sensors while designed for long life are expected to operate in a relatively benign environment. Unfortunately, the result is that many of these otherwise attractive devices don't always work in an appli- cation requiring a long life in an extreme environment. Figures 12 and 13 give some information on automotive transducer needs Let's look at the matter of long life and the extreme environment in the automobile. I'm sure that everyone is aware of the fact that the basic warranty is one year or 12,000 miles. However, the design goal is a minimum of 50,000 miles and for some systems maintenance, responsibility for 50,000 miles is a legislated requirement. En- tirely aside from this, the car performance for the entire life of the car is a matter of concern to the manufacturer since poor per- formance after two or three years could easily send a customer to the competitor's showroom for his next car. In addition, there is the very considerable cost of warranty which provides a strong economic motive for long life.

I'd like to put some numbers to the argument. Assuming a system with 25 parts which is not a very complex system--and assuming failure rate average of one failure per million miles of each of a per year, these parts if the average car is driven 12,000 miles of every 100 cars would fail during

then, on the average, 30 out

the first year because of this system. If one failure per mil-lion, miles isn't a familiar number it equates to a mean time between However, the number ignores the failure of 33,000 operating hours possibility of storage life failures in spite of the fact that during a million miles the part will have been stored, experiencing tem- for over 700,000 hours.

perature cycling and possibly reverse bias, of 0.1% per 1000 hours.

This gives us a combined failure rate

a simple system is

Obviously, 30 cars in every 100 failing due to

point of view- -and from the

unsatisfactory from the customer's

on the order of a $100 million'

manufacturer's who would be 'facing warranty bill for the U.S. car population on this one simple system.

I'll admit ` a 0.1% per 1000 hours isn't a particularly attractive failure rate but, in the extreme environment under the hood, we can't seem to find satisfactory transducers that will meet the level, nor can we find displays that completely fill the bill. fortunately, the processor electronics exceed this modes requirement.

SELECTED TRANSDUCER NEEDS MANIFOLD ABSOLUTE PRESSURE SENSOR: REQUIREMENTS: • ±.% ACCURACY AT 25' C OVER 0" TO 30" HG RANGE • LONG TERM STABILITY AT "UNDERHOOD" ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS CONTENDERS a LIMITATIONS: •!SOLID STATE SILICON DIAPHRAGM COST, UNPROVEN STABILITY •'METAL DIAPHRAGM - LVDT - COST, SIZE • RUBBER DIAPHRAGM-POTENTIOMETER-- ACCURACY, CONTACT LIFE AIR MASS FLOW SENSOR: REQUIREMENTS: • ±26 ACCURACY OVER 0.75 TO 35,0 #/MIN FLOW RATE • TIME CONSTANT `5 MS, PRESSURE DROP 0.1 PSI.

• LONG TERM STABILITY AT UNDERHOOD ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS CONTENDERS & LIMITATIONS: • VORTEX SHEDDING _ COST, PRESS.& TEMP.COMPENSATION REG D • MOVING VANE ACCURACY, PRESS.& TEMP.COMPSA, REGID • ORIFICE PLATES, PRESSURE GAGES - SIZE, ACCURACY, RANGE, PRESSURE AND TEMPERATURE COMPENSATION REQUIRED • HOT WIRE ANEMOMETER NONLINEAR, CONTAMINATION FUEL FLOW SENSOR: REQUIREMENTS; ACCURACY OVER 0.3 G/H TO 30 G/H RANGE

• t2%

TO +150% UNDERHOOD ENVIRONMENT • -409 C • AP X0.5 PSI AT FULL FLOW, FAIL SAFE FUEL FLOW CONTENDERS & LIMITATIONS: TURBINE TYPE - - PULSATION SENSITIVE, COST, ACCURACY -'COST, UNPROVEN, REQUIRES AMPLIFIER • VORTEX DEVICES • POSITIVE DISPLACEMENT COST, SIZE, FAIL -- SAFE FEATURES • ROTOMETER - LIMITED RANGE, ACCURACY SPEED SENSORS (ENGINE, WHEEL, VEHICLE) REQUIREMENTS: • ACCURACY OVER 0 TO 100 MI/H OR 0 TO 6000 R/MIN RANGE t1% • UNDERHOOD ENVIRONMENTS, STEAM CLEANING, INSENSITIVE TO EMI • SINGLE LEAD WIRE, UNDER 1.0 VOLUME IN CONTENDERS a LIMITATIONS: • VARIABLE RELUCTANCE - LOW SPEED DROPOUT, COST • HALL CELL - ACCURACY OVER TEMP RANGE • INDUCTIVE - HIGH SPEED ACCURACY NOT PROVEN • REED SWITCH- MAGNET CONTACT BOUNCE, SENSITIVITY TO LOAD CONDITIONS, FRAGILITY • OPTICAL - SENSITIVITY TO CONTAMINATION AND STRAY, LIGHT SOURCES EXHAUST TEMPERATURE SENSOR OR SWITCH REQUIREMENTS: ACCURACY OVER 400 ' TO 1100 * C 0 ±100 C RANGE • <1 SECOND TIME CONSTANT 0 LONG TERM STABILITY IN EXHAUST GAS STREAM, CHASSIS OR UNDERHOOD ENVIRONMENTS CONTENDERS & LIMITATIONS: • THERMOCOUPLE - LEAD WIRE EFFECTS, NEEDS AMPLIFICATION FEW DOMESTIC SUPPLIERS 4 THERMISTOR - FEW DOMESTIC SUPPLIERS, COST 0 RIME' ALLic DEVICES - RELIABILITY, LIMITED RANGE • CURIE EFFECT IMATERIALS - TEMPERATURE LIMITATIONS, EASILY FOULED HUMIDITY SENSOR: REQUIREMENTS; • ±11$00 PPM°ACCURACY BETWEEN 7000 AND 21,000 PPM, RANGE 0-36,000 ;PPM s TIME CONSTANT 10 SECONDS, -40' TO +85% OPERATING RANGE CONTENDERS u LIMITATIONS; • POROUS SEMICONDUCTOR --NEEDS ELECTRONICS - EASILY CONTAMINATE • HYGROSCOPIC SALT --NEEDS ELECTRONICS - STABILITY - NEEDS ELECTRONICS --EASILY CONTAtoINATc s DEW POINT SENSING FIGURE 13 To put these numbers more in terms of product requirements, it is seldom possible to get a reliability budget for a relatively simple system more generous than 1% failure rate over the car design life of five years or 50,000 miles. This says that our components should have an average mean time between failure of over 4 million operating hours or a combined storage/operating failure rate of less than 0.001% per 1000 hours. That still means that nearly 20,000 cars in the U.S. population would experience a failure during the first year because of this simple system.

Since I mentioned the extreme environment under the hood, let's take a look at our present environment requirements for under-the- hood applications (Fig 14 and Fig 15), and the passenger compart- ment requirements aren't all that much less. These are typical for most applications. In addition, each application may or may not have individual requirements. One of the more common is thermal fatigue which typically requires self-heating the device (if it is a powered device) to a case temperature rise of 75° C, turning off the power for 200 sec so, reapplying power and so or on, for 7500 cycles. Another "cutie" that shows up a lot of applications is the static electricity or lightning test. This calls for a 1.5 microsec 15,000 V pulse.

to quit. While I have talked only about auto- I'm finally going motive systems and requirements--including environments--I suspect that general aviation avionics will have to meet very similar performance, reliability, and cost requirements. I think these requirements can be met if we do our homework properly. I have no doubt that we can provide the end user with real value for his money and I'm going to be interested in what you think.

I think maybe we'll stop for coffee here, unless some- DR De BRA: body has particular comment they want to make.

REMOTELY PILOTED VEHICLES MR. FRANKLIN: I'm not here to show you what I can sell you; I'm here to find out what I can buy from you. I'm going to talk about remotely piloted vehicles, specifically, little airplanes. These airplanes range in weight from 100 to 300 lbs. They're a Tittle bit bigger than model airplanes and quite a bit smaller than drones.

They're propeller driven and gasoline engine powered. What makes interesting is the complexity of their mission.

them important and This is an airplane to very small, very cheap, which has be a usable by people who don't anything about airplanes.

and know So we have to worry about cost of components and 'how easy it is to check out, launch, and operate the bird, and how easy it is to make it do its mission. A typical mission for a vehicle of this kind and ENVIRONMENTAL REQUIREMENTS (UNDERHOOD) STORAGE (NONOPERATING) -50% TO +150%, ANY TEMP - 1000 HRS TEMP CYCLING (NONOP) -50% TO +150°C (30 MIN DWELL AT TEMP EXTREMES, MAX TRANSITION TIME, 5 MIN„ 1000 CYCLES.

POWER TEMP CYCLING 1000 HRS, -40°C TO +125°C TEMP CYCLING & DWELL, 0.5 HR TRANSITION TIME) (1 HR DEVICE OPERATED WITH POWER ON 5 MIN., OFF 5 MIN. DURING TEST +150°C,, LIQUID-TO-LIQUID, THERMAL SHOCK -500C TO 5 MIN. DWELL EACH EXTREME, TRANSFER 150 CYCLES.

TIME 5 SEC. MAX., C FOR 1000 HRS.

HUMIDITY 85% RELATIVE HUMIDITY, 85 ALL INPUTS REVERSE BIASED.

ELECTRICAL TRANSIENTS ALL VOLTAGES MEASURED FROM +14 V DC BIAS; LOAD DUMP: 50 V OR 100 V'DEPENDING ON APPLICATION, EXPONENTIALLY DECAYING TO 20 V IN 200 MS, +32 V TRANSIENT: BOTH + AND - PULSES MUST EXCEED 20 uS DURATION +250 V TRANSIENT: BOTH + AND PULSES MUST EXCEED 0.5 PS j1S +450 V TRANSIENT 5 MHZ BURST, 20 IN DURATION VOLTAGE EXTREMES MUST WITHSTAND +24 V DC FOR 5 MIN. (25%) MUST WITHSTAND -6 V DC FOR 30 SECONDS (25'0 MUST OPERATE FROM 4 V TO 24 V, BUT IN MANY CASES MUST MEET FULL OPERATING REQUIREMENTS ONLY FROM 8V TO 16 V DC.

FIGURE 14 ENVIRONMENTAL REQUIREMENTS (CONT'D) MECHANICAL SHOCK 3 FT DROP TO SMOOTH CONCRETE — ALL 6 FACES HANDLING — 500 G'S — 1 MS; 10 TIMES IN EACH OF 3 PLANES LOW IMPACT — 1500 G'S — 100 }1S; I DROP NORMAL TO PLANE OF HIGH IMPACT HORIZONTAL MOUNTING POSITION.

VIBRATION LOW FREQ: SINUSOIDAL SWEEP OF 10 TO 100 HZ AT RATE VARIABLE OF 10 HZ PER MIN, CONSTANT DISPLACEMENT OF 0.065 IN., 2 HRS IN EACH OF 3 MUTUALLY PERPENDICULAR PLANES.

I VARIABLE HIGH FREQ: FREQUENCY RANGE OF 100 TO 2000 HZ WITH APPROXIMATE LOGRITHMIC VARIATION OF FREQUENCY AND CONSTANT PEAK ACCELERATION OF 20 G'S, ENTIRE RANGE TRAVERSED IN NOT LESS THAN 4 MIN, 3 PLANES, RESONANCE 30 MIN. DWELL AT RESONANCE PLUS (WITHOUT DAMAGE AND WITHOUT CHANGE IN LOGIC STATES DURING TEST) RADIO FREQUENCY INTERFERENCE ROCK AND DUST HAZARDS.

SALT 'SPRAY OIL AND GASOLINE EXPOSURE FIGURE 15 (FRANKLIN Cont) size is: fly 20 to 100 miles slowly, a few 100 ft. above the ground, while looking for targets of opportunity like trucks and tanks; and send video messages back continuously to a TV monitor at the control site. If something is found, put a laser beam on it and keep it there, while a laser homing munition is launched.

Now that's a pretty difficult mission for something that weighs

150 lbs and is not supposed to cost anything at all.

I've come here today to tell you that we can't find the components to fit into these airplanes. We're having to make our own com- ponents which we don't really want to do. Let me run through some of these things we're looking for.

We'd like to find some very low cost and very small rate gyros.

There's a real gap in the industry in the area in which we're interested. If go to a model airplane store, you can find a

you

rate gyro for $75. Model airplane people buy them and put them on

model helicopters, but it's basically a toy with quality just too

low for our use. Two years ago we were required to build an air-

plane with the cheapest possible autopilot. We chose to use the conventional wing-leveler autopilot based on the tipped rate gyro concept. We went to a general aviation source and bought a rate gyro for $245. At the last minute we decided not to fly it because we were afraid of its reliability so we paid $600 for a Condor- Pacific rate gyro. Although it was really too heavy for our application it suited our purposes in other respects because it has its inverter and demodulators inside the case. We could supply it with 28 volts and just make it go.

We flew that one successfully, but it's much too heavy and much too costly. When we won a contract from the army we had to build

a somewhat better autopilot and go to two gyros. Now we're talking

about a tipped rate gyro for the wing leveler mode and a pitch rate

gyro for augmented pitch damping. We went to industry and asked

them for a two-rate gyro package with all the electronics inside.

Hamilton-Standard came through with a package which costs only $300 more than the Condor-Pacific Here is an example of their gyro.

product. You can see that the package is still a little too large

and heavy. Visualize that in a 100 lb airplane, which also has to

carry a TV system, and a gimballed laser package. What we want is

we can't

a really small rate gyro like this one from Honeywell. But afford it.

This Honeywell tiny gyro does exactly the same thing the Hamilton

Standard package does but it costs $2500, so we've gone beyond the

knee of the weight-cost curve. We can't affor d the Honeywell gyro even though we love its

size and weight. So if one of you would

like to make some two-axis gyros like these and sell them to us at

$500 to $600 apiece, we'll buy a bunch of them.

We have problems in other sensors too. Our airplanes are too small to contain directional and vertical gyros. I can't find them for less than 3 lbs, which is too heavy. They cost $3500

and that's too expensive, and so we stabilize our airplanes in

pitch with pressure sensors. We don't have any attitude sensing in pitch at all. We use air-speed hold, and therefore we need a dual-port pressure sensor.to measure indicated air speed. This Rosemount sensor is too expensive and too big, but it's interest- ing to us because it puts out an accurate linear analog voltage which is a function of indicated air speed. What we really want is something like the dual sensor from National Semiconductor.

-port

Functionally, this is the same as the Rosemount device but it costs only $75. All of a sudden we're in the right price range; and obviously it is the right size, but it is not suitable because its "second order effects" are dominant.- We can't use them because of excessive hysteresis and poor temperature stability.

Well you see the situation we're in: we find ourselves trying to shop in areas where there's just nothing available. Model air- plane devices are not quite good enough, although we use some of them. For instance we've been forced in one of our military R&D ventures to go to the model airplane store and buy plastic-actua- tors. I believe the best one costs about $47.50 retail. We've used this for the engine throttle, elevator, and rudder of a military aircraft, but it just barely does the job. And once in a

while, the plastic gears come back with their teeth deformed and

the output shaft distorted and permanently set.

DR. SMYTH: Chuck, may I ask a question about your attitude indicator?

Did you see an article written by someone in model airplanes about measuring voltage potential?

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes, we use electrostatic autopilots too. -Electrostatic

sensing is being used all over the United States now by model air-

planers. It consists of putting a device on each wing tip which

can sense the electrostatic potential of the earth. Electrostatic

potential lines, of course, go radially between the earth's surface

and the ionisphere. If you can measure the potential difference you

can determine whether or not one device is higher than the other.

sell it to the

It works well in test applications but you can't

They don't want depend upon a device that has to be

military. to

kept clean, for instance. If a little engine oil gets on these

devices they stop working. If you fly in a thunderstorm, everyone

will. If

says that the airplane turns upside down. Well, maybe it

you fly under power lines it may do this too. What I'm saying is

that there are many military applications for which it might serve,

and offer complete two -axis stabilization" pitch and bank for $100

not including servos to operate the elevators and ailerons.

We would like to go to conventional attitude gyros because the systems that we build now under the constraints of weight and cost are very loose systems. If you are going to fly around holding pitch only on air speed, the airplane is going to pitch around quite a bit in gusty conditions. You really can't find a way to tighten it up and hold attitude very well. It's like trying to fly on an angle of attack. If it gets hit with a gust, the airplane is going to feather into the gust. The airplane is supposed to be on a reconnaissance mission so you'd like to pro- vide a stable platform for the TV and the laser; so there is an incompatibility. We want a very stable aircraft platform that responds to commands, and holds its attitude in bank but we don't want to spend any money or weight to put in attitude gyros. The problem isn't being solved at the present time.

You might be interested to know that we're using true RNAV guidance. This is accomplished with all of the equipment on the ground, since we are in continuous communication with the air- craft. The operator on the ground prepares his missio4i and punches in up 99 way-points. The airplane goes to those way-points to without human intervention. The thing that is interesting about it is that the equipment on the airplane is absolutely minimal.

The wing leveler autopilot will respond to turn-rate commands so all the guidance computation is done on the ground, and steer- ing commands are sent to put it back on the proper ground course.

Not only is way-point guidance built in at this time but also the poor man's equivalent of an ILS system.

DR. De BRA: Thank you, Chuck. Any comments or questions for Chuck beyond what we already have?

` MR. VANDEN BERGE: Chuck, I hope you find the solution to all those problems because we could use the same devices in the real airplane.

- DR. De BRA: It looks like the speakers from the two areas we hoped would bring salvation to general aviation are hoping it goes the other way. Clearly the sensor and actuator problems seem to reo q ire-most attention in both of those fields which were peri- ph lP} • al to general aviation to the two areas of aviation which are sisters of the general aviation: commercial and military aviation.

We'll start with Dick Schoenman's comments on the commercial ,, ^^-P+ COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT MR. SCHOENMAN: The commercial aviation industry is in a difficult place with respect to certain constraints on avionics; for instance, price and weight. The cost of electronics equipment for those types of airplanes are 3 to 5 percent of the total price of the vehicle.

The weight is also quite small in terms of the total payload: 2 to 3 percent. You can see that in the commercial aviation industry we have relatively more freedom with regard to cost and weight, that is, as compared to the general aviation field. Now you'd think with those relaxed constraints we might have a quantum jump on reliability; but we really don't. We package size in some cases.

We can improve reliability, for instance, by improved dissipation.

methods.

I'd like to discuss first a group of improvements in technology that relate to systems. I'll just say a few words about electronic displays, inertial sensors, digital computation, and system inte- gration. Then if we have time I will talk about the second group which is more associated with operational capability: low visability, and approach and landing, and 3-D and 4-D area navigation.

is a fair amount of

In the area of electronic displays, there research done in industry relating to the use of electronic attitude director indicators and horizontal situation indicators.

The object here in going to these types of displays is to gain some measure of integration of functions. Fig 16 is an electronic attitude director indicator combined with a forward-looking TV camera which allows an actual visual scene of the runway to be displayed. Other functions are displayed including radio altitude, potential flight path angle, and pitch attitude information.

Fig 17, an electronic HSI with additional information added:

is

a horizontal deviation bar, vertical deviation scale, attitude

information, selected course, actual headings the airplane's position, and predicted flight path for 30-sec intervals. This is an indication of things that are being worked on. The problem with incorporating this type of display into the general aviation market is cost.

The next item I'll talk about is inertial sensing. One of the major expense items in the electronics complement of a 747, is three inertial navigation systems.- Their cost is on the order of

$100,000 per unit so that is $300,000 for a triplex system. In

addition to the navigation function they're very useful for getting good basic information such as attitude, and cross-track velocity which can be used for automatic landing systems. However, we've found that although this information is very useful for autolanding system design, it's` too expensive to acquire unless the airplane has a requirement for inertial navigation. There is an industry move towards strapdown systems. A strapdown system is essentially one in which rate gyros and accelerometers are strapped down on a platform. This information is processed through a computer and

Format

ndicator

Director

Eiectronic Attitude

ILS

AIRSPEED

Rnoio

MONITOR

ERROR

//,/—ALTITUDE

t f^ V • • i • ^i

ARTIFICIAL

one"

HORIZON

POTENTIAL --

FLIGHT

r.*.

PATH

'

wr...

^YtY+1M-^^yCi 9 S

10 0 PITCH

_VELOCITY VECTOR

LINE

(FLIGHT PATH AND

DRIFT ANGLE)

TELEVISED

GROUND

IMAGE

FIGURE 16

ELECTRONIC HORIZONTAL

SITUATION INDICATOR

h-AlROffMWWj"

"TO" WAYPOINT

HEADING

NAME

SELECTED COURSE

SELECTED COURSE

TIME TO GO

WA Y PO

I N T

COMPASS ROSE

[ C

t 3 PLACES

DESIRED PATH

ul

VERTICAL DEVIATION

TREND VECTOR

AIRPLANE SYMBOL

HORIZONTAL

DEVIATION

REC-IPROCAL POINTER

111..

Aw

& SCA,_E

7X7P39-40R 1 3-20-75

FIGURE 17

(SCHOENMAN Cont) accelerations andlinear and angular velocities, and positions are produced along with somewhat degraded navigation informa- tion. A system like this is predicted to cost half as much as

the standard inertial system. It will supply the same quality

of input you normally get from directional and vertical gyros, rate gyros, and accelerometers at comparable cost. We've flown a s y stem at Boeing that has an error of about 2 N miles per hour, which is about competitive with gimballed systems. Some reasons for pursuing strapdown and replacing the rate gyros, accelero- meters, DG, VG, and compass systems are equivalent or lower cost, higher quality data, higher MTBFs, lower airline user cost, and a

display cost. In

potential to reduce flight navigation and addition, there are some very interesting other potentials because of the possibility of integrating air data with it or even flight control functions. The strapdown inertial naviga- tion data is not quite as good as that of a gimballed system.

On the other hand, if Omega is the primary method of navigation, it can be used to update the strapdown system.

I'd like now to discuss the field of digital computation. I think we all pretty much accept the premise that we're moving very quickly to digital technology for air data and inertial NAV systems. I think the next round of flight control systems will be digital, and there's a great deal of interest and research money being spent by a number of companies these days to develop auto- matic flight control systems using digital processors. One of the problems we have to face with our airline customers is that they're very concerned about integrating on too large a scale with respect to functions. We have come to the conclusion that integration will

occur in two distinct categories: those systems that are required

for dispatch, vs those that are not required for dispatch. Now

it's very likely that we will, in fact, integrate a number of 'func

tions that are not required for dispatch, but systems such as air and attitude information will not be integrated on a large scale.

The NASA Langley 737 is probably 'a first attempt to perform large- scale integration of digital navigation and flight control.

Concerning the use of strapdown systems or inertial information in automatic landing systems, 'I should point out that there's been some work done to indicate that if you do use inertial information as the primary means of obtaining attitude and path information, kind of long term update.

you can use the glide-slope information as a

is or problems

It then much less susceptible to failure conditions

type of system

associated with localizes or glide-slope ;noise. This

under an FAA contract and has been used in a number

has been flown

of other experimental autopilots for the past 3 or 4 years. I'll

and close with a brief summary of what we see

skip over the RNAV occur in the next five years: digital flight ` control elec-

could

tronics, automated 3-D flight path control, automatic thrust control,

low cost inertial measurement,_ expanded digital implementation, and

of course, advances in flight deck displays.

MR. MC RUER: Dick, there's been a certain amount of emphasis on autoland in your talk. I'm reminded of a comment by the Vice President in charge of Engineering for an unnamed airline. I'd like to repeat it here and see whether it's your current experience that autolanding is as important a future requirement as you've indicated. The comment was: "So far autolanding hasn't been worth a pinch of (expletive deleted)." Now, how much has it turned out to really be worth in operations?

MR. SCHOENMAN: I would say that within the United States, interest in automatic landing is at a fairly low level, because the percentage of time it's really needed is low. There's a great deal of interest right now in trying to extend capability beyond Cat II to something like Cat II+ or Cat IIA. The decision height would be down to something like 50 ft and still allow the pilot to make the actual landing. In other words, it would not require a fail operational system, and so there is a move afoot today to see whether or not the fail-passive system could be extended down to that region. The airlines are quite interested in it, but the basic reason for this controversy is that they say they can't afford the initial cost or the maintenance cost of a Cat III system.

MR. GORHAM: It is not that we're trying to get better than Cat II — ithout autoland, with the pilot taking over at 50 ft. The premise w of that system is to use autoland even if it had one level of redundancy less. At 50 ft, the pilot either has to continue on the autopilot because it's obviously unreasonable to expect him to take over a heap of airplane at 50 ft, or he goes around if he doesn't like what he sees. It's still autoland but it's -a lower cost autoland because it has one less level of redundancy. I think that's what you're saying, isn't it?

MR. SCHOENMAN: No, not quite that. My understanding is that the pilot could in fact continue the landing at 50 ft,if he did lose the auto- landing system.

DR. De BRA: Do these conditions also apply to general aviation?

MR. SCHOENMAN: It would apply to general aviation as well as commercial, if this particular approach is fact really certified by the FAA.

in MR. MC RUER: My question in the first place was whether autoland should be a significant or just a minor goal for the future of general aviation avionics?

MR. SCHOENMAN: My guess is that general aviation will approach pretty cautiously in the Cat II capability first before they move into anything as sophisticated as automatic landing. I'm not even sure it's necessary in that particular area.

I would like to just make one other comment. There is a fair amount of interest in autolanding in Europe. A couple of our customers who fly 747s are very keen on this now. Some are disappointed at the performance of the systems they've been using but they're still interested in getting this capability on other airplanes.

DR. De BRA: Thank y ou. Dick Smvth will talk about the Mi l i tary aircraft, the other half of the larger airplane business.

MILITARY AIRCRAFT DR. SMYTH: I have the pleasure of addressing the other end of the spectrum. We talked about $20-$30,000 avionics systems up to a half-million dollar avionics systems. I've been involved in the F-111 avionics system which was $1.2 million and the B-1 avionics system which is approximately $5 million. You might ask why we are discussing such a subject in this meeting. Well I think there are some lessons to be learned; and there are some ideas in architecture that are now made possible, particularly in the computation area, by the advent of microprocessors. I think that everything that anybody's ever thought of implementing, and certainly everything that's been talked about this morning, has now been done military avionics systems.

in I'd like to speak briefly of some of the functions, mechanization techniques, and architecture involved in some of the more complex military avionics systems. I have a couple of examples of the impact of the new technology, particularly the microprocessor technology, on the next generation of military avionics systems.

A weapons delivery system which has the objective of delivering a weapon to a target is different from a general aviation system.

However, many of the functions of the weapon system are the as navigation, same as for a general aircraft avionics system such control, etc. Some of the topics involved in our weapon delivery system are navigation, target acquisition, and tracking, release point guidance, weapons release computation (in which you compute where a weapon's going to hit on the ground and adjust the release so that it hits the target).

simple ones There are a number of navigation systems. Some include TACAN/DME, and dead reckoning using air speed and heading, (see Fig. 18).The figure also shows various radio navigation aids Someone mentioned today that we're that you're all familiar with.

looking for a universal worldwide navigation system. The Dept.

of Defense and the Air Force has now come up with that answer: GPS or NANSTAR, which is a form of a navigation satellite.

NAVIGATION

• SIMPLE NAVIGATION SYSTEMS

• TACAN 1 DME

• Dead Reckoning

• RAD I 0 NAV I GATT ON SYSTEMS

• LORAN C / D

• OMEGA

• NAVSAT

• INERTIAL NAVIGATION SYSTEMS

• MULTI-SENSOR NAVIGATION SYSTEMS

• Doppler - Inertial

• Inertial - LORAN C ID

Doppler - Inertial - LORAN

• Doppler - Stellar - Inertial

FIGURE 18

(SMYTH Cont) Whether everybody's willing to drop everything they're doing and use that is another question, but the Air Force thinks that they will.

Inertial navigation systems are still here and the trends toward strapdown systems that have been mentioned are certainly strong and part of the future setting. By putting the various naviga- tion sensor systems in digital form, you arrive at some interest- ing multi-sensor results through the use of Kalman filter algori- thms-. For example, the Mark II Avionic System included Doppler- Stellar-Inertial Navigation with position updating by means of radar, visual and electrooptical subsystems.

The concept of functional redundancy is important in anionic systems containing digital computers. Someone has mentioned the term "central computer." A single central computer (with the single CPU) can very well become a fuse for the avionic system.

To avoid this, the concept of functional redundancy has been introduced. For example, the B-1 system has three general-purpose computers, each one of which computes certain functions so if any one of the computers is lost the other two can still provide all functions, perhaps in a degraded fashion. If you look at the kind of computers that are in the B-1 or the F-111, you say we must be out of our minds talking about multi-computers for General Avia- tion, because those computers cost $60,000 in large scale production. But if you start looking at what a microprocessor CPU costs these days, $20 to $100 (and the trend is certainly down), having multiple CPUs in a general aviation aircraft systems archi- tecture certainly is a feasible thing to do from -a cost point of view. So functional redundancy for computers means computation redundancy spread over more than one computer.

Figure 19 is a picture of a simple air-to-ground fire-control system that has TV displays, radar, and the other components displayed. The question of the usability of CRT displays comes up. On the F-111 Mark II avionics there were 5 CRT display sur- faces including a vertical situation display on the commander's side, multi-sensor display on the System operator's side, hori- zontal-situation display (basically a moving map) in the center, and each pilot had a CRT projected head-up display. All of the primary flight information was put on the CRT surfaces and there was 4-way redundancy. There-was early skepticism as to whether pilots would accept CRT displays but they did. However, there was a little 2" electromechanical ball asbackup in case all those computers andthe signal converters which drive the CRT surfaces failed.

The next example I have is similar to the last system except the objective here was to define a helicopter fire control system including all the sensors and the computation for something in the range of $5 to $10,000. The question was: can it be done? The

Sli" PLE AIR-GROUND FIRE CONTROL SYSTEIft.41

a

rWEAPON DELIVERY COMPUTER i CURSOR COMMANDS - -^ CURSOR COMMANDS ANGLES & RATES_ trJ I ` LEAD ANGLES F GUNS, BOMB .^ T.V. TRACKER AND MISSILE LASER TRACKER ( TRAJECTORY ' HEAD UP DISPLAY SIMULATION CURSOR COMMANDS MANUAL LOCK ON, RELEASE CONTROL T.V. DISPLAY COORDINATE 4 RSPEED CONVERSIONI AI GUNS, BOMB AND I PRESSURE ALTITUDE AIR DATA MISSILE r ---- - - COMPUTER 1 ( ANGLE OF ATTACK BALLISTICS ANGLES RADAR i RANGE =- - - - HELMET SIGHT PITCH .RELEASE ROLL WEAPON ATTITUDE STORES RELEASE REFERENCE .RACK MANAGEMENT HEADING VERIFICATION FIGURE 19 (SMYTH Cont) answer is: maybe. Certainly the use of microcomputers is one thing that may make it possible. In this system there was a very low cost PWSR (Pilot weapon system readout), basically a very simple head-up display with about 10° field of view. A similar low cost head-up display was used for the Apollo rendezvous. There are three reticles that can be directed by the microcomputer. One is reticle to command flight path relative to a fixed reticle, one is the target location vehicle, and the third reticle indicator is the electro-optical sensor boresight. In this case the electro- optical sensor included a laser range-finder pointed by a manually- steered pantograph which directed the line-of-sight towards the target. The gun gimbals were slaved to the EO line-of sight with the corrections computed by the microcomputer to take the account of ballistic droop. There was also a similar computation for the rockets. The sensor inputs for this system include air data and other simple sensors. All of the required functions could be implemented with an existing, fairly slow (5 microsec) microprocessor and a hardware multiplier. The microcomputer parts would cost about $400 in quantities of a thousand for providing all these functions.

Another example is based on an air defense missile guidance and control, which includes a strapdown inertial system for both the flight control attitude reference and for inertial navigation. It is a very low accuracy inertial navigation system since it is updated by ground radar every two see. The implementation used two CPUs and a shared memory; one processor is for the inertial and homing guidance and the other is for flight control functions. This system was implemented using a bipolar Schottky microprocessor, the Intel 3000 series, and again the cost for parts of the microcomputer is less than $6,000.

Future trends: We are going towards simpler weapon delivery systems.

Strapdown inertial systems represents a strong trend, eliminating the gimbals and hopefully resulting in lowering cost. Terminally guided weapons lot of requirements on the launched aircraft's reduce a systems and requires a fairly gross acquisition basket for launching.

The impact of dedicated MOS-LSI computers are beginning to be strongly felt in the systems being designed for the next set of requirements.

I think that microprocessor technology will permit the implementa tion of most avionic functions that we can imagine, provided we can devise means to convert the sensor information into digital form for the computer, drive the actuators, and display the informa- tion to the pilot.

Just to give one personal example of what this technology can do and its potential, I've now skippered boats on the trans-Pac race to Honolulu three times. The first two times, we used the-age-old way of navigating by having a big thick set of documents that stored the star almanac, the sun almanac and other navigation tables.

We would read the sextant and then spend another hour or so plotting all res.ults on a board and hope we didn't make mistake in plotting.

a On this last race I had a Hewlett Packard 65 and I bought the $40 HP 65 navigation pac. All the dead reckoning was done with two little cards feeding into the calculator, which gave me my dead reckoning position within 60 ft. (How accurate it was was another matter.) I had another set of cards for taking sun shots. All I needed then was my $50 sextant, a $70 microcomputer watch, my $800 microcomputer or calculator, which you can now buy from TI for $400, and these little magnetic programming cards.

DR. DENERY: Dick, what is the status of military development of Universal digital avionics module?

DR. SMYTH: I've been following that closely. The Air Force Avionics Lab is sponsoring that program, the ACTRON Division of McDonnell- Douglas has had one of the principal contracts. They have come up with a very interesting 16-bit microprocessor that is supposed to be very fast. The basic idea is a modular avionics approach to satisfy the simple close-air support missions, which usually has the very simplest avionic systems to a more complicated all-weather inter- diction mission, which has more complicated avionic systems. The program includes display technology, the computation technology, etc., to build on a modular basis from the simple systems to those that are more complex.

DR. De BRA: I'd like to introduce Bob Noyce who is Chairman of the Board at Intel. He will talk with more than a little authority on the electronic solid state industry.

SOLID STATE ELECTRONICS DR. NOYCE: I was more than a little interested in hearing from repre- sentati ves of the automotive industry who sell products for $1 a lb, and from the avionics industry whose products sell for from $300 to $500 alb. I did some rough calculations and our solid-state devices, as packaged, sell for about $10,000 per lb. The semi- conductor chips, which are the heart of our product would sell for half a milli-on dollars a pound without the package.

While this figure sounds like -a lot, the history of pricing in the semiconductor industry provides a startling contrast in terms of price reduction. For example, if you 'look at the cost per function vs.

time, the cost of a flip-flop in integrated circuit form dropped from $10 in 1963 to less than a, penny today. This is a'thousand to one decrease in cost over a ten-year period. I can think of few - other products that have dropped in price since 1963 and certainly none so drastically.

(NOYCE Cont) The low cost of individual functions is even more amazing in some of our newer, more complex circuits. Of course, the reason for this accomplishment is the number of functions we've been able to put on a chip. In the early 1960's the first integrated circuits had 3 or 4 components per circuit (Fig. 20). Now we are putting tens of thousands of components in about the same area. Our 16K CCD serial memory, which is now on the market, has something in the order of 35,000 components on a single chip. Nor is there any reason to expect this kind of improvement to slow down. We are far from reaching the fundamental limits in the complexity of circuitry that we can put on a single chip; we have at least a couple of orders or magnitude improvement to go before we get into any major problems. However, we did face another dilemma as complexity increased.

From the first IC's, the industry went to multiple functions--dual gates and flip-flops, and then quads, and so on. We still dealt in basic circuits, but managed to put more and more of the Boolean functions on each chip.. At that point, it became apparent that we were going to have to developnot only more circuits, but different circuits that would satisfy the needs of fewer customers. The market for each new product became smaller and smaller, a disaster for any industry predicated on making its profit in volume.

The design of an integrated circuit used to cost $10,000. Recently, with more complex circuits, the average cost rose to $100,000 and, now, with highly complex circuits, the cost of designing and debugg- ing a major, new circuit might run up to a million dollars.

It became apparent that it was impractical to do a competent engineer- ing job with one of these new, complex devices which have a limited application. For a period of time, we thought the answer might lie in the use of computer aided design. For an expenditure of 10 million dollars, automatic systems were developed that could produce, in 'a short time, a number of circuits. Those circuits considered unsatisfactory could then be scrapped. The problem was that we estimated that we would have to design 30 circuits a day, at a cost then of $30,000 to keep individual costs down. Because other tech- niques would have cost a million dollars `a day, it did seem as though the computer was the only solution to our problems.

We now know that this is not the case. There simply were not enough engineers in the world versed in semiconductors to handle all of the potential design requirements. The answer was the development of microprocessors, capable of simulating any digital login combination.

Introduced in late '71, and still in their infancy, the market for these devices in 1975 was about $50 million 'Fig. 21) From the number of references to microprocessors during this morning's dis- cussion, you can see that their potential is already beginning to have a profound effect on everyone's thinking.

1,000,000

100,000

10,000

IK RAM 1,000 as JO0 z

a

ist

I'C

1960 1970 1960

CONTINUES

C01M.PLEXITY OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

INCREASE, NEARLY DOUBLE EVERY YEAR.

TO FIGURE 20

MICRO-C

MARKET

TOTAL

a

J

J

d

to

p Mct,10RY

RAM, ROM

co

PROM

.i 200

PERIPHERAL CIRCUITS

CPU

DESIGN AIDS

1970 1930

THE ^uCOIAP MARKET IS JUST BEGINNING TO

DEVELOP, IT INCLUDES MUCH MORE THAN THE CPU.

FIGURE 21 (NOYCE Cont) Microprocessor CPU's represent 10 to 20% of the market so their total sales in 1975 were in the $10 million range. There are also numerous design aids that have to be provided along with CPU's. Peripheral circuits previously not available are also becoming available. Incidentally, many of these peripheral con- trollers are much more complex than the processor itself, so we have to be careful in developing these circuits to be sure that their volume requirements are sufficient to keep us from going broke again. And, of course, the major part of the microprocessor market is the memory that serves as the brain for the whole system.

Microprocessor technology is changing quite drastically (Fig. 22), following the historical precedents set by digital IC's. Looking back at IC development, the first integrated circuits, RCTL, were very slow and very inefficient in terms of computation power, although in 1974 they did manage to get us to the moon. That lag between development and utilization seems to be inherent in this business.

DTL and TTL circuits came along next. TI decided that they weren't going to make DTL, dropped the price of TTL, raised the price of DTL and literally drove that product out of the market.

Yet, TTL is much faster than is required in most of the applica- tions in which it is being used. Now high speed computers are using ECL which came into maturity in the late '60's and early '70's, In LSI technology, the first calculator chips were in the speed range of the early integrated circuits which had preceded them a decade before. They were PMOS metal gate devices, Now, NMOS sili- con gate devices are most widely used today, and they, surprisingly enough, have about the same switching speeds as TTL. This com- is important to note, for MOS technology is commonly parison "slow technology when it really is as fast thought of as being a as TTL. I will also mention I 2 L here because of the amount of publicity it has received. In my opinion, I 2L will not become a widespread technology because the switching speed of NMOS is improving rapidly and because I 2 L has some fundamental limitations.

As a result of the changes that I have discussed, the role of the semiconductor manufacturer has changed quite drastically over the 15 years (Fig. 23). In the late '50's, we were simply manu- past facturing components. We had to have some circuit designers so that we could at least specify the devices in terms of circuit parameters. With the advent of IC's, we were obviously in the cir- cuits business andwe had to consider how the user was going to integrate these chips into his logic. As we progressed to larger logic blocks and then to medium-scale integration, we had to take into account the architecture of a;,system to make sure that what we were providing were practical subsystems 100 ns ^RCT L PrAOS

LS{

TTL

h1'tOS

LQ ns 12L

ECL

ns

----^-

-f

1960 1970 1980 AFTER INTRODUCTION, THE PERFORMANCE OF ICES IMPROVED RAPIDLY. THE SAME IS TRUE CF LS I.

FIGURE 22 APPLICATIONS

SYSTEM

SYSTEM INTEGRATION

TASKS

SOFTWARE MICRO COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

GIC DESIGN relsl

COMPONENT

TASKS

IC CIRCUIT DESIGN DEVICE DESIGN

EACH CHANGE OF LEVEL OF INTEGRATION HAS

FORCED THE COMPONENT SUPPLIER TO ASSUtrE

ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES.

FIGURE 23

(NOYCE Cont) With the microprocessor, we are taking on another major task.

The word "software" in Fig. 23 refers to the design aids that we must provide to help the user who is actually programming the processor. Because we must increasingly become more knowledge- able about system architecture, the task we are undertaking becomes increasingly more sophisticated.

Yet, there is a limit to what we can do to exploit the literally thousands of applications for the microcomputer. It will be up to you, the avionics industry, to help find the right applications for these devices.

The reason for this is simple. In terms of fanning out from our abilities to design and produce micro processors, we're much better off using our capabilities to educ- ate the world than to try to do the additional jobs that are required. That is why, on an average day, Intel will run classes in which there are 30 people who are not associated with the company.

As I said earlier, there is no reason to think that trend toward greater complexity is going to stop. Also, the drive for greater speed is continuing. Projecting these trends out to 1980, where will we be?

The 8080 is very close to the level of complexity of the mini- computer, although somewhat slower and less sophisticated in terms of architecture (Fig 24). In a sense, you could say that the microcomputer now is where the general purpose computer industry was a decade ago. In terms of the improvement in capability, this time lag, represented by the time required to progress from a CPU made of individual components to a CPU on a single chip, is shortening. By 1980 those computers on the market a'couple of years ago will be available as a single chip computer. Looking, further ahead by 1985 we will be able to put the entire main frame of a 1980 computer on a single chip.

I realize that these projections may be of primary importance to the data processing industry. However, as was pointed out in several talks this morning, one of the first cars GM built with a microcomputer control used a 4-bit P-channel microprocessor which handled 20 functions and still had time to spare to handle any other jobs required. Of course, they had to have about 6 cards full of other logic surrounding the CPU to enable it to interface car. _Typically, control functions are slow with the rest of the so there isn't much need compared to data processing requirements, for increased speed.

The present day 8080 is already 10 times as fast as its predecessor.

There will be another improvement, by a factor of 10, within a year, and a factor of 10 improvement a year after that.

O

X

V W lE

S' 0

co F- W

N 0 ~ G

f

1 1

108 LARGE COMPUTER

v

NUNI COMPUTER

W

SG

I Q

n

MEMORY

z

ECL

^

s

i 104

crnT TL

W RTL zo

0 100

BY 1980 THE SPEED COMPLEXITY OF THE MICRO-

COMPUTER WILL BE COMPARABLE TO THAT OF

TODAY'S LARGE C P U'S .

FIGURE 24 (NOYCE Cont) Price is another important consideration. The 4004, with one tenth the speed of the 8080, was selling at $40 during 1974. The 8080 is now selling for $30 according to the most recent ads by our competitors. (And that is out of date one month later--Ed.).

It is also important to note that this device is now being manu- factured by Advanced_Microdevices, Texas Instruments, Siemens and by Nippon Electric as well as Intel, so there are five suppliers worldwide. That means that we are getting a de facto standard in at least one class of microcomputer. Thus, peripheral circuits will be capable of being interfaced to that processor whether they are made by the present suppliers of the processor or by the

rest

of the industry. This is going to be an absolutely critical factor from the standpoint of cost.

It's obvious from the comments made this morning, that sensors are going to be the problem. Processing represents no problem

in today's microcomputers., But it is essential that we have-low-

cost ways of getting the input and making use of the input.

The other point

that was so heavily emphasized this morning was the need for

reliability. In that context, I would like to make

a

couple of remarks. As a pilot, I don't really care a great deal

about fail-safe type failures as long as I am warned about what is happening. I am still supposed to be there in the cockpit, and I can turn off various pieces of equipment and reconfigure the system. With a redundant system, someone else has made those decisions in advance and they are not necessarily the best answers. I would much prefer to consider that decision making process one of my responsibilities when I am the pilot.

There are numerous analog phenomena that would be very useful if

we were able to put it into digital form for processing. This

is another area in which our industry can make major contributions.

For

example, 10-bit A to D converters are now available, which are microprocessor compatible. If it were usedin the measurement of

absolute pressure, you would then be able to determine altitude

within a 50-ft error Ho e ert ` ' do th infac i _w v i es require some o er ng chips to mike the whole system work.

The point, though_,, is that it is only another single chip of sili-

con, capable of being used for numerous measurements. With sufficient volume, that chip could be produced for a dollar to two.

There are other applications for this type of device, besides measurement, which would cause the market to explode. The proper

way to transmit messages over a telephone is to digitize voices

at the instrument

and then convert to an analog signal at the

other end. For that application to be practical, the converter

would have to have a 6- or 7-bit accuracy and sell $2.50.

for about

(NOYCE Cont) With sufficient motivation, the high cost of analog to digital conversion could be drastically reduced. I believe that it will be accomplished, and reasonably soon, because large volume applications do exist.

Another area with great potential is the self-scan linear optical arrays. Typically, these consist of a string of 120, 250 or 512 photodiodes, with a digital output. If you wish to transmit a mechanical motion, you just count the number of diodes that are dark, and the number that are light and get a digital output that indicates the position of the object being sensed. These devices have been used for position sensors in the process industries and some other applications. They sell at relatively high prices, although the cost to manufacture is low, because of the volume and nature of the market in which they are being used.

I'm convinced that we know what has to be done to produce avionics that are reliable, low cost and a significant technological improvement over what is presently available. To make something reliable, we must make it in large quantities so that we can find and eliminate failure modes. To make it low cost, we must also have the economic benefits of high volume production.

The technology is already here, having been developed for the data processing industry. Despite the fact that microcomputers have been in production for two years for the data processing industry, they have not had the impact on avionics that they should have had. There are only three major systems being designed around the earliest MCS-4. The 4-bit processor could be packaged with enough memory at a cost of $100 and would be quite adequate for most jobs.

The conclusion that I offer is that to get kinds of devices the required for avionics with the reliability and low cost required, you must stay right in the middle of the commercial mainstream, depending upon the automotive industry for the development of trans- ducers and the data processing industry for data processing capabilities. These industries will produce the large volume applications of the types of devices that are compatible with avionics.

On your part, the most compelling need I see is that of standar- dizing on a data bus interface. I don't know whether it will be practical for avionics, but certainly the data bus that will will become the standard for most of the data processing industry be set by IBM.

6$ You made a comment about redundant systems and said MR. GORHAM: you didn't care too much about failures as long as they were passive and you received a warning when they occurred. That is the same philosophy we have in the airline industry. The reason we do use automatic redundancy (where we use more than two systems on the basis that a failure would still provide you with a survival capability automatically) is that in some flight modes, there isn't time to reconfigure. Two such modes are in automatic landing when you're near the ground and in the use of the stabilization system, the failure of which will leave the airplane unstable.

DR. NOYCE: In the general aviation field, you're not apt to have automatic landing systems, and you're not going to fly airplanes characteristically unstable. It would be unsafe.

that are MR. GORHAM: I think we'll talk about that tomorrow. But if the technology is available, as you know, somebody will take advant- age of it; so there's a chance that is going to happen too.

You recommend the data processing industry as the source MR. SEACORD: of e ectronics. Is the data processing industry going to produce or demand something to meet the temperature requirements for avionics? If not, what is it going to cost to get that tacked on?

DR. NOYCE: Typically, we are right now qualifying all of these microp rocessors for the miliiary temperature range. In some cases, the 125° limit is being relaxed to 100 or even 85 0 (Centigrade) OnF:•'of the problems that we may face here is over-specification.

I certainly agree that it provides a harsh environment but it's certainly no worse than the automobile. The automobile industry is going to write commercial specs to operate in their environments.

That's 10 million units a year instead of 100,000. I would heartily endorse the idea of adopting their specs and not military specs.

They're probably going to be more severe in some cases but they're going to be more realistic.

MR. OSDER: When you talk about next bear's avionics bein q 10_times ^ Taster than this year's, to what extent is next year's equipment software compatible?

That's a difficult question. It is certainly possible DR. NOYCE: to increase the speed of the . straight 8080, by a factor of 3, but there are important advantages to be gained by changing the archi- tecture of the device doing the instruction decoding while you're taking care of the execution of the last instruction, etc. In those cases there will not be compatibility at the op-code level. We will try to maintain compatibility at the programming level, whatever that is, but if it is too rigidly controlled for its total software compatibility, performance will be degraded.

DR. SMYTH: What do you see in the development of higher level languages for your microprocessors?

DR. NOYCE: Let me go back to what I said as to the meaning of soft- ware, to the component supplier. This is going to be programming languages only, where the designer has set up a particular ROM for solving his particular problem. We have a lot of customers that are writing FORTRAN, BASIC or whatever to run an 8080. They're writing it in these programs. It's a question of who's doing it.

It is certainly possible to get a general purpose computer to run any high-level language on it if you're willing to sit down and write a compiler. The question is: whose expense that is going to be at? One of the problems that we get into in this business, thq because we expect multiple sourcing is that first supplier goes in and develops the market and spends a milk,=^ dollars on software; the second supplier comes in and copies th a urawing of it, reproduces it and sells it only at hardware cost. That is the problem and I frankly don't know the answer to it. You need enough money flowing into the system to provide for new development costs.

So far it hasn't been a problem because there has been enough time lapse between the original supplier and the second supplier coming in to permit the first supplier to recover his development costs.

DR.De BRAN Let's go on to talk about the most often referred to, sometimes editorially called "distasteful" but clearly, one of the key items in this whole thing: displays. Parvis Soltan of the NavalElectronics Lab is going to give us a rundown.

ADVANCED DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY DR. SOLTAN: I am delighted that emphasis has been put on display technology by this morning's speakers, and I certainly agree with the previous speakers that with the development of a computer aboard aircraft and its interaction with display devices inside the cockpit, great things for avionics can be expected. Now, first, I'd like to talk to you about the essential parts of the display system and try to point out that there is not a single display system that can solve all display needs. Then, as you have all expressed interest in Advanced Display Technology and its future trends, _I shall give you my views in that respect.

Parts of Display System: There are actually five essential parts in any display system, as shown in the block diagram of Fig 25. They are: Information for Imaging, Transformation, Memory, Panel Drive, and Display Media. Reviewing this data flow, one has to receive high quality analog or digital information at the Imaging section, properly scan and convert it at the Transformation section, use the Memory block for stored codes speed buffering and information refreshing then drive and scan a specific panel, and finally display the information to the viewers in an acceptable form on a display medium.

ESSENTIAL PARTS OF DISPLAY

TE CHNOLOGY

(5) (1) (2) (4)

Panel Display

Information

Transformation

Media

Drive Imaging

IT

# CRT

Scan Conversion • Electron Bean

Sensors

e Laser Scan • Flat Panels LED

• Symbol Generatior

Computers

• Matrix addressing & Plasma

(3) Scan Liqiud crysta

EL

Fiber optics

Memory

^ CCD

• Buble „ Devices:

• Plated wires

• Charge storage

• Magnetic Thin film

FIGURE 25 (SOLTAN Cont) Looking again at these five essential parts of a display system, one should realize that there are competing devices and tech- nologies within each section. For example, for Memory, tech- nologies like charged couple devices (CCD), bubbles, plated wires, magnetic cores and magnetic drums compete. For the Panel Drive section, electron beam technology competes with matrix addressing scheme. Or for Display Media, CRT competes with flat panels, i.e., plasma panel light emitting diodes (LED), electroluminescence (EL), and liquid crystal (LC) panel.

It is evident that a display system designer has no easy time selecting an optimum combination of all these competing techno- logies and devices for an ideal single display system. In other words, there is not a single system that can be a solution to all display needs.

Military and commercial industry are concerned about the cost of display systems. Presently, CRT is unquestionably the leader as far as low cost is concerned. Looking again at the five essential blocks of Fig 25, it costs less than a dollar for a CRT oriented system to display an alphanumeric character. No other display system can compete with this cost. As for the plasma panel, it is presently less than $3.00 per character; LED, less than $4.00.

Although cost is important, for some military applications it is not the only factor. A CRT that can be purchased commercially for under $100 will not meet military requirements. To satisfy the Air Force's electromagnetic interference (EMI), electromagnetic pulsation (EMP), radiation, shock, vibration, intensity and resolu- tion requirements, the cost of a CRT climbs to $4,000 to $5,000 a unit. So one recognizes that the cost alone, for some applications, is not the main factor.

A display media is very slow as compared to the computer and the sensor inputs. The Memory section of the display system plays an important role in acting as a buffer between the fast computer and the slow display panel. The recent trend is to move the memory block and incorporate it within the display media. Display panels with inherent memory, like plasma panels, are becoming very attrac- tive because the need for refreshing will be eliminated.

The trend in advanced display technology is toward digital display and large system integration (LSI) of all the five essential blocks that were discussed earlier. It is apparent that the new field effect liquid crystal (LC) panel, with less than 6V panel require- ments, is suitable where plasma display, which requires over 100V for panel operation, and especially the CRT, with a voltage require- ment of 10,000 to 25,000V are not compatible with this LSI trend: SOLTAN Cont) To summarize this part, one should realize that there is not a single display system or display media that could be the panacea for all display needs. One must choose, shop around, in order to select the right combination of the FIVE essential display parts for one's display needs.

Display Media: For the rest of my presentation, I will concen- trate on the display media (the fifth block of Fig 25). The disph.ay media can be divided by size (Fig 26) into three categories: 1 - Instrumentation Display size under 4 in' 2 - Tactical Display size around 20 in or less 3 - Large area Command and Control Displays size 6' x 6' to 20' x 20'.

1 Instrumentation Display Let us look at Fig 27, the Instrumentation Display. Here, the aircraft and other instrumentation systems use a large number of single function displays and indicators for displaying status information such as flight parameters, navigation information and equipment conditions. Present devices that perform the display functions are generally less than 4 in' in size and are scattered around the cockpit of the aircraft. Small CRT, neon bulbs, electro- luminescent panel, incandescent lamps and gas discharge indicator tubes are a few examples. As many of the previous speakers have indicated, the trend and the future requirements for this class of display devices are integration and on board monitoring by a digital computer. Fig 28 shows the requirements and display candidates for future aircraft displays.

- Let us review this area a little deeper. With the exception of some gradual improvement in format and reliability, and some successes in the integration of displays, there has been little change in the cockpit instrumentation, its supplements and various housekeeping aids over a considerable span of aviation history'. As a result, the pilot's burden constantly increased in pace with has the increasing complexity of weapon systems and air missions A large percentage of the pilot's time and attention must be focused on scanning and reading "raw" parametric data representing the out- put of discrete, dedicated sensors. With few exceptions, this information must be interpreted by the pilot into mission specific or housekeeping information meaningful in terms of satisfying a need for knowledge of the tactical situation, safety-of-flight - and weapon-system status. Another important aspect of the operational problem lies in the area of military effectiveness.

CLASSMCAMN OF MSP LAV

APPLICA0 MNS

- t-ion of less)

?.- - lnstrL9i?1Lnt- DiJpIuj/s (4 in'

Aircraft and other instrunient'ation systems

viihich use a large number of single function

displays and indicators for dis'playing status

Lift3P'ma-Z-1otl

2—

Tactical Displays (20 In 2 or, lesr)

For the presentation of raw data from. sensors

used in such applications as fire control,

mapping, terrain followinry, and surveillance

3 a-- Large Are Comrnand and Coritral Displays

(J X 6 Ft io 20 X 20 l=t)

Lar ge area displays for tactical or fixed sight

app ications

--^- a6 8 U N '^^'MN MS PLAYS (2 I

QN OR L ESS)

Singdo function displays and indicators for

displaying:

• Flight parameters

• Equipment conditions

• Ra'J;gr@"Ho n i n or m a-Uon

Prescnt display systeQn s

• Incandescent lamps

• Indicator tubes

• Neon bulbs

• Gas discharge indicator tubes

• E8ectro@uminescont panols

• Lig6hf emitting diodes (LED)

• EIcctro mocha nical indicators

FIGURE 27 ORIGINAL PAG.P ' OF POOR QIIALITjY^^',

F, 'fE'HD AND NEW CANDMAT ES FOR

- v o ' E N S TPR U V O N

l me p, .A al E NT'ATI

DISPLAYS

E..e quif

eryients

Integrated instrumentation systems fo-r

optimurn information transfer of all flight

information ii1cluding on board check out from

a c©mi)LIter

Display Candidates

• Irnproved CRT

• Plasma Panel

• I_ED Panel

• Liquid Crystal Panel

• CR- T + Ei ger Optics Flat Panel

(SOLTAN Cont) The accuracy of functional control, e.g., weapon delivery, is limited by display resolution and controlability.

Current cockpit instrumentation systems are primarily imple- mented with electromechanical devices, servo-driven mechan- isms, and, in more advanced systems, complex optical and analog electronic circuits. The maintenance of such equipment and its logistic support requires high skill levels and results in a significant impact on life cycle cost. A parallel set of problems exists in the area of cockpit controls. Tradition- ally, the pilot has been confronted with an array of bat handle, rotary and push botton switches, all dedicated to discrete functions and identified with abbreviated nomencla- ture. A high degree of virtuosity, coupled with extLnsive (and expensive) training, has been necessary in mastering the manipulation of a sophisticated weapon system.

The trend is for a totally new approach to the man-machine interface. This approach will satisfy the existing deficien- cies in cockpit instrumentation and controls. Specifically, provisions should be made for: a. Strong emphasis on human factors engineered funs- tional utilization, format and symbology. Fully integrated display/control, including backup cap- ability between terminals.

b. Introduction of a system of integrated, interactive cockpit instru- displays and controls and design of mentation as a visual information system for the pilot to permitrapid assimilation of data.

in order to accommodate c. Provide a versatile capability the various aircraft sensors without costly reconfigu- ration of the cockpit, and provide for a major reduc- tion in the number of discrete switches by providirl multifunction control for increased man-machine compatibility.

d.- Provide multifunction displays for operations in all modes under night and nonvisual conditions; provide for display and annotation of all current and planned sensors on a single, multifunction terminal.

(SOLTAN Cont) 2. Tactical Display Figure 29 gives the tactical d isplays category for 20 in' sizes or less. Here the display devices are generally used for the presentation of raw data from sensors in such applications as fire control, mapping, terrain following, and surveillance. Presently, CRT monitors are widely employed.

Note, however, the limitations of CRT, especially its high voltage, poor form factor, and incompatibility with IC tech- nology. The future trend and advanced technology, as shown in Fig 30, are with improved CRT technology and digitally controlled flat display panels.

3. Large Area Command and Control Display Figure 31 presents the large screen display devices where the size category ranges from 6' x 6' to 20' x 20' or larger.

Large displays for group viewing are not as highly developed as the individual displays. At present, because of cost effectiveness, the projection type of display system is widely employed both in civilian and military applications.

For increasing numbers of military requirements where space is at a premium aircraft M d submarines), or at control ( centers where key personnel funciion in synchronization, the projector based display system seems cumbersome and inadequate.

For example, the projection throw distance, bulk, weight, power drain, and incompatibility between an analog device and digit- ally generated information signals are among the reasons that the military is exploring other competitive techniques for developing large area flat panel type displays for command control and communication ( C 3 ) systems, In Figure 31 a number of present systems that are employed are reported; however, in the past several years, industry has sought a large flat display technology to free users from space problems, large power consumption, and the high maintenance requirements of the projector based large screen displays. Up to now, however, from the four leading competitive technologies (electroluminescence, light emitting diode, liquid crystal, and plasma), none are cost effective nor free from inherent technical problems sufficiently to be seriously considered as an alternative method to replace the projector based approach.

Figure 32 gives the requirements for an acceptable large screen 1 14 d' d F' a 33 t t h 11 isp ay, an g repor s on a new promising- ec n^que ca e "Fiber Optics Image Expander." This technique is based on the employment of low loss, or medium loss, fiber cable and expansion of that image at the other end over a large display panel. If 7s

2-TACTICAL D

Purpose:

To display generated information from Computer, electro

sensors, radar,and IFS surveillance systems.

magnetic

Pres ent sy stems

each sensor is widely used.

• A Single Color CRT for

CIRT Limitations

• Poor Form Factor

• High power requirements (10-25 Kv)

• Short life (500-1000 hrs)

• Diff icuit to view under high ambient night

Difficult to interface directly with computer

(Interface circuitry must be used).

Commercial Color CRT's are not suitable for military

TREND AND NE-TV CAN D I DATES FOR TACT I CAL

DISPLAYS

Rcc_lLiJ rem gnts

• /Advanced, high performance aircraft mission requirements

dictate the use of avionic systems with a centralized high

speed computer.

• Displays that are easily interfaced with computer circuitry are

needed.

• Display must be capable*to operate in complete darkness as

%yell as in high int-onsity (10,000 FL Lamberts) ambients.

and

• Memory storage, or variable persistence is desirable to

lessen the update rate required from computer.

rend and new candidates

T

• Improved CRT coupled with solid state memory

• Digitally controlled

Hat display panels with integrated driving electronics (plasma,

LED, liquid crystals)

• 1:1 -24 flknv nn+ir+c Aleniw nnnnl 3—LARGE SCRE E EN MPI A YS.

(6'x 6' aO 20 x20')

Purpose

multiple viewer displays for ^uc^ ce!

Large area

l l oo5.

orrfi; cd Site command and control app! a

Present Systems

o 110anual Plot-t-i g

o Scribl g Project ors

o rapid Process Fifes

o

Projection CRT

c

Oil Film light valves

o

Projection laser displays

cPiiozo^hrromics, therincplastcc and liquid

cryst al li ,ht valve projection sclhemes

FIGURE 31

TREND AND NEW --GANDMAT-ES FOR LARGE

SCREEN-DISPLAYS

6' TO 20' x 20')

gUiromonts

fi

on screens

a Intensity 50 fit. lambert

resolution 30 lines per in minimum

10:1 in typical environment -

Contrast

o MTBT 5000 to 10,000 hrs

o Power & maintenance Low

co

_.

N

e Operating mode Dynamic & static

Trend and new candidates

o Light enimLing diodes (LED) panel

o hl sma panel

o Fi'bOr optics image expander

FIGURE 32

FIBER OPTICS IMAGE EXPpl

LARGE SCREEN DISPLA

I p,

PARABOLIC

PLASTIC REFLECTORS EXP!! I

OR SPACING

L I G I

5mil FIBER

OPTICS SPOT SIZE ------_,^':'

PLASTIC FIBER

ll^ OPTICS i (SOLTAN Cont) this. technique proves feasible, enormous cost savings will be realized by elimination of the traditional panel drivers, circuits with electronic components necessary for scan and selections, as well as power needs for the large screen dis- play panel and its maintenance.

Device Problem Areas and Future Direction in Display Technology: There are many unexplored technologies whose merit to the display art has yet to be determined. Liquid crystals, electrochromics, fiber optics, ferroelectrics, etc., are just a few examples. Work in these areas must be continued to the point where careful evalua- tion%can be made of competing techniques to determine which approach will be acceptable and the most cost effective.

Supporting technologies must also be pursued. Work should be con- tinued on techniques for matrix addressing, memory systems for CRT refresh, deflection, etc., to support and improve the utilization of available technology.

Present aircraft that employ sensors like FLIR, SLR, low light level TV, sonar, and lasers for weapon delivery or navigation, utilize either individual displays analog scan converter tubes to provide or selected multisensor data on a single display. Such systems are highly complex and lack resolution, dynamic range, and reliability and because of the sophisticated analog circuitry, they require cons- tant adjustments and continual maintenance. Currently, two approaches to alleviate these problems are envisioned. The first approach is to develop solid state storage targets to be used in storage tubes and scan converter tubes in order to provide simultaneous read and write.

The other approach is to apply digital techniques for data conversion and storage for multisensor display applications.

At the present time, there is no practical solution to the problem of providing group displays for mobile, tactical systems. Required is a technique for providing a 6' x 6' display, or larger, that is light, compact, low power and rugged. The preferable embodi'ment of such a device would be some type of flat panel, matrix display.

There are presently at least three candidates for such applications;_ the plasma panel, modular light emitting diode, and the liquid crystal com- matrix. These techniques have not 'progressed to the point where plete operational feasibility has really been proven Tactical Display Ground mobile, seaborne and airborne displays are display. These devices heavily reliant on CRT oriented devices for weight are important have serious handicaps, especially where size and system parameters. equipments are also subject to the most These stringent environmental stress of all categories of display hardware.

A replacement for the CRT is needed to fill this gap. Some candidate technologies are liquid crystals, electro-chromics, light emitting diodes fiber optics, plasma panels and digitally addressed CRTs At the present time, none of these approaches have progressed to the point where testing can demonstrate conclusive superiority of any approach from a given problem. Figures 34 and 35 summarize the critical display problem areas and areas for future development.

DR.SMYTH: Could you comment about seeing display panels in bright sunlight in the cockpit?

DR. SOLTAN: As far as panel brightness is concerned, there are two extreme requirements in the cockpit; viewing in total darkness and within the 10,000 ft lamberts. The latter is the equiValent of having the sunshine over the pilot's shoulder, directly onto the display panel. Using a liquid crystal panel, for example, the direct sunlight is no problem because of reflectivity of the panel. Viewing in pitch darkness, however, is of some concern and artificial light is necessary to illuminate the panel.

FIRST PANEL DISCUSSION CHAIRMAN: Duane McRuer; PANELISTS: Frank Jaumot, Bob Noyce, Frank Riddell, Louis Seeberger, Purvis Soltan MR. MC RUER: The primary reason that I'm the Chairman of this Panel has little to do with my technical competence in any of thecom- ponent areas that we're going to be discussing. Instead, I rather believe that it's because I'm a guidance and control systems engineer and Dan thought that a systems viewpoint coupled with component ignorance would be useful in keeping the other people around here honest.

Since this is a Panel Workshop, one of the primary functions of

the Chairman is to lay out the ground rules and procedures that we are going to follow, so I thought I'd tell everybody all at once--including the panel members. Several of the people on the Panel havehad an opportunity to speak before; thus we'll give the

rest a similar opportunity to speak for not more than 5 minutes to

say something, in order to permit them to catch up with the others, although they won't have the time for presentations like those made this morning and this afternoon.

With that out the way, we will turn to the basic charter of the

of

Panel. This is given terms of the three questions in your agenda

in

The context from which we're ,going to address the questions is

bused upon today's presentations. We will go in a formal round- table fashion starting with Frank. For instance: on question CRITICAL OR PACING DEVICE PROBLEM AREAS NEEDS FOR; • MULTI — SENSOR DISPLAYS • TACTICAL LARGE SCALE DISPLAY • TACTICAL (AIRBORNE, SEABORNE AND GROUNDMOBILE DISPLAYS) • MAN/DISPLAY INTERACTION FIGURE 34 ISSUES, RECOMMERATIOIS, Al FUTURE DIRECTION • CRT IMPROVEMENT • FLAT DISPLAY TECHNOLOGIES • HUMAN FACTOR WAN/DISPLAY INTERACTION) • SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES: 0 MATRIX ADDRESSING 0 MODULAR TECHNIQUES 0 MEMORY SYSTEMS 0 SCAN CONVERSION FIGURE 35 (MC RUER Cont) One, Frank will say something and then we will turn to Jerry and so on. We'll do that, hopefully three times, and I'll attempt to maintain some sort of control.

I'd like to be forgiven one other function of a panel chairman and that is to get all the generalities out of the way at the outset so that we don't have to go through that every time.

First off, I want you to know I am both against inflation and deflation and for flation--we all are. Secondly, the answer to the questions at issue are going to be based on the grounds of utility, cost and reliability. These are the driving factors; they've been pounded upon in each of the discussions here earlier this morning.

Utility is simple enough. Being somewhat of a skeptic it has been my general observation that utility is converted to those things that are "Absolutely Required;" and "absolutely required" converts to those things which one can do and, more often than not, those ultimately get put on the airplane. Obviously, things that are absolutely required are quite different in the varieties of aircraft in general aviation ranging from $2 to $5,000, all the way to $200,000.

Cost and reliability are achieved by high volume, and are probably tied in with technology transfer from the automotive and other high volume businesses. That would have as a corollary that we should avoid all peculiar general aviation environments which are not consonant with the automotive environment. We would like to have, in going into the 1980 to 1990 time frame, not just a simple, straightforward evolution in general avionics, but instead, a one set of components, i.e.

resolution. The revolution is here in the electronic components; the followup of this electronic revolution with advances in the sensors and the actuating elements is clearly going to be the key driver for an overall avionics - revolution. Another remark on reliability that ties in with the one on utility is the note that Dick Schoenman made this morning, that functions will tend to expand such that the reliability of the overall system remains constant.

Now, with the general remarks concluded, I'd like to turn to those members of the panel who have not yet had a chance to say anything.

We will start with Frank Riddell.

MR. RIDDELL: Well, I'm like Mr. Frank',in: I'm here today with hat in hand to ask for help. I feel like a maverick in this deal. I'm the only engine man here. The price of the typical electronic' equipment in the 172 Sky Hawk is $5,000, which is more than the cost of the engine. Now if that electronic equipment quits : the man is still able to get home, but if that engine coughs once, all hell happens. To me it is quite something.

(RIDDELL Cont) I was also interested in the gentleman's statement that in the automotive electronic equipment you're talking about, fail safe, and being able to limp back to the repair station. Well, flying at 25,000 ft above the clouds and over the Rockies, you can't very well limp home. Our bad experience with electronics in the engine field is with the highly sophisticated computer that occupies the left seat of the airplane and can't remember from time to time to either put fuel in the tank or to drain water out of them. So far we haven't been able to run the engine on air or water. So that's our experience with computers.

We're going to have to get into electronics equipment if for no other reason than the new emission laws. The fuel controls that we have now are fine for max-power, for climb, for cruise, but we have problems around the airport during taxi-idle conditions, because of the emission laws. The biggest percentage of the emission cycle is based on idle taxi conditions so we're after something that will give us better fuel control in those areas.

We do have a difference in operation between the aircraft and the automobile. We don't have the up and down. We don't have the cold start. Our engines are at constant speed, they operate on a prop load and because they operate on a prop load, in an emergency condition it is nothing to take the engine from idle-power idle speed, to full-speed full-power in less than two seconds. I in the eyes might point out that another restriction we have is of the experimental pilot. At one time we built a 907-20 engine that Piper put in their Commanche. Bill McNary, who was then Chief Engineer at Hartford, was complaining because the engine wouldn't idle properly. I said, "Bill, show me," So he locked the brakes (it was a warm day) and we ran the engine at full power until everything came up against the red line--the cylinder head temperatures and oil temperatures. The engine was just sitting there cooking fairly well. He said, "Now watch. He jammed the throttle and said, "See, it doesn't idle!" And you've got to remember that we don't a flywheel like the automotive people.

have When they asked me to come out and talk, I went back through some of the requirements of the aircraft engine. I'll g ive you some of the ranges of operation. Manifold pressures on flare is below 7" Maximum manifold pressures are 47". These are absolute figures Pressures ahead of the throttle can run anywhere from 13" to 50".

Tem p erature ran4es are from -30° for startin g and o p erafla, - at aitituae. Norma,iy, aspirates engines wiii get up to tuu- un turbo-charged engines the temperature range will go up to 400 sits

This 400° is a temperature in the nacalle, when the engine

the on a hot day when the airplane has come in and you shut down soak.

engine. It's called a hot Fuel pressures: Right now we're running anywhere from 35 to 40

lbs per sq in. We'd like to maintain about 15. The main reason

for that is that we do have a requirement in the FARs that air- craft have a backup fuel pump and this backup fuel pump in the aircraft requires either low pressure or a very expensive pump.

The fuel flow ranges on the 4 cylinder engines are pretty good, 4 to 100 1'bs an hour. In the highly turbocharged engines we do from 6 to 340. We would like to end up with electronic fuel injectors which would have a plus or minus 0.1" of mercury

variation and a 10° temperature variation. There is another re-

quirement and that's the electric voltage that will be available.

The planes are normally 12 to 24 volts, depending on what the customer wants. However, we did have one airplane that they asked us to work on to try and standardize on a starting procedure.

We tried it. We had a battery in it that was fully charged On a cold day we went out and cranked it and the prop came up. The standard procedure of the aircraft people is to put a very small wire between the battery and the starter and we thought that was our problem. Just for the heck of it we put in a volt meter on the battery. Lo and behold, that 12 volt battery dropped downto 3 volts and the battery is so small; the internal resistence is so high.

Vibration spectrum: We have recorded on some of our engines, the following g-loading: 23 1/2 at 175 HZ; 14 1/2 at 835 HZ; 15 at 800 HZ and 30 g at 150 HZ. Those vibrations were a smoker's dream because everytime the airplane went down to the end of the popped open!

runway and full power was applied, all the ash trays

have is the accuracy of sensors, tempera-

Some of the questions we

ture drift of black boxes because these black boxes are going to

have to be put on the engine, and what can we expect if we can't get 1/10" mercury accuracy? What can I expect in pressure and temperature measurement or sensors?

MR. MC RUER: Thank you, Frank. Next: we'll hear from Lee Grisntore, to just illustrate one or two points that

MR. GRISMORE: I want

may not,have been emphasized today. First, to reiterate one point that was made, there are 131,000 general aviation air- craft now, and 197,000 projected for 1982. These figures

may not be exactly right but they were 'taken from the 1974 Avia-

tion Almanac so they're probably in the ball park. New production was supposed to be something like 8800 aircraft and 21,006 pro-

we con-

jected for 1982. If you assume that any new avionic system

aircraft

ceive probable will not be highly retrofitted in existing

because of expense and non-compatibility with panels, air frame, and_a hundred other things, then you're talking about a market of something like 10 to 20 thousand units even if you installed your (GRISMORE Cont) system on every new plane that's manufactured. This means that it's not a high-volume market. It means that general aviation is not going to force the market appreciably, and it just empha- sizes the fact that we literally are going to have to design systems that live with advances made in other areas. Even if business flying has a certain percentage done by private business- men with 172s and 182s and what not, you get the strong feeling that it's not a good idea to help general aviation design a $100,000 avionics package. We are talking primarily about the small user who is by far the most predominent. There are $100,000, $200,000 and $2,000,000 airplanes in the general aviation fleet. But in terms of actual distribution of tasks, I submit that that's probably a very small percentage of the general aviation community and that one needs to be careful when he talks about advanced system to make sure he addresses the bulk of that community.

Along those lines then, if you look at rough numbers, single engine aircraft from something like $8K to $50K, multi-engine (I'm not talking about jets or turboprops or anything like that) air- craft run from $38K to $240K. And that price does not include the avionics package that we've talked about today, but just the basic engine and flight instrumentation. The biggest share of operations are in the single-engine area with $8 to $50,000 airplanes. Look at the number of holes in the panel of those kinds ofairplanes and look at what instrumentation costs in the run-of-the-mill general aviation operation. Count holes and you'll see that there are roughly 12 instruments that monitor engine parameters in a single engine aircraft: oil temperature, oil pressure, fuel pressure, etc.

Put a number with those instruments and say that at the plant they cost $150 an instrument to put that in the aircraft. That's $1.8K of engine parameter instruments. Flight maintenance will normally run somewhere around seven instruments and that's air speed, artificial horizon turn and bank, that kind of instrument--so those are only $250 per instrument. Again, you're $1.8K; and then assume you've got a VOR receiver, maybe two receivers, ADF, transponders; of that group, let's say navigation takes five instruments--that runs $6 1/2K--you're talking about a package around $10,000 in If we're talking about a complete avionics system, instrumentation not just navigation but a complete aircraft maintenance system, then we are talking about a run-of-the-mill general aviation aircraft $10,000 aboutg system that is lower t lower.costandjhigherrreliabilitytalk than what we've got now, we're talking about designing an avionics package that runs somewhere from -a basic system of around $4,000 to # maybe a high performance system of $25,000. Suppose we could design and conceive a basic package of high-performance electronics to do a systems job for somewhere in the vicinity of $8,000, and on the basis of addressing the major general aviation community today, that seems to me to be where we are. In terms of the dollars that we've heard from the speakers today, there is a large gap here If those numbers are right, and they probably will be disputed, then we indeed are not talking about a slight improvement in things; we're talking about a quantum jump to a signiricantly different system.

MR. SEEBERGER: I came today to tell you a little bit about what Hughes Aircraft has been doing in the display area. What I'm going to show you is the result of about five years of effort on the part of our company, plus a little bit of help from the Air Force and the Navy--and I mean a little bit--because we put more money in ourselves than we've got in our contract so far.

About five years ago we looked into the question of providing a pictorial display in an aircraft where you have a wide range of ambient illumination to deal with, particularly the high end of the scale. After a very careful tradeoff study we concluded that the liquid crystal approach was probably the one that had the most promise. There were a lot offundamental problems with liquid crystals at that time--remember I'm talking about five years ago.

Most of them dealt with the question of life, speed of response, contrast ratio, and things of that sort, but our studies indicated that all those things were capable of being improved, and I think we've gotten to the point where we have improved them.

We are manufacturing at the present time, a liquid crystal panel which is essentially a matrix built in the form of an LSI chip.

The matrix that we're manufacturing at the present time is 1" sq.

It has 100 picture elements along the line, and 100 lines on the p; in other words there are 10,000 elements in each one of the 1" squares.

This chip is formed on a 2" wafer using standard LSI technology.

Remember there are 100 of these along a 1" section of the chip and 100 lines deep; and at each one of the crosspoints we have a small MOS transistor, a capacitor, and the liquid crystal itself.

This is essentially a sample-and-hold circuit that will take in an analog video which is addressed into the display, sample it fashion, and hold that charge for a full frame period of television.

We are using a very thin liquid crystal 'layer in fact it's less than a mil in thickness, and it is a specially formed layer. The system that we have running in the laboratory right now will reproduce a TV image with no discernible lag. In our experimental form right now, we are mounting these on much larger substrates so we can get to them. Our plan, of course, is to provide LSI drive chips. Right now we're driving these with MSI--ICs are on the outside simply as a matter of expediency because we're interested in demonstrating that you can, in fact, build a cell of this type.

Figure 36 is a photographic reproduction of the kind of image that we were able to produce on this cell over a period of time. This particular one, dated 1974, shows a number of line defects that occur in the process of producing this kind of a chip. About mid- year we were able to produce this chip and although it's hard to see from where you sit, if you come and look at this closely you will see that this isn't a painting; it actually is a matrix dis- play which has been formed by the 10,000 elements and it has zero defects. Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer; there are three defects out of 10,000 on that chip, and we've produced over 12 of them of that quality since June--that was one of the milestones in our Air Force cor{Uract that we had to meet.

The problem was one of process control; handling the masks in such a way that w:. minimize the number of defects as we put the chip together. We think that it's the way to go for video or pictorial display in aircraft and at the present time we're moving in the direction of making larger displays by putting these 1" modules together. Yesterday I saw for the first time, a quad of four of these modules that had been put together and were operating with a TV input signal. Our plans at the present time are to proceed with the development of inter-connect techniques that will allow us to assemble more than four of these chips to create an even larger display. The problem is rather apparent once you have more than four, you have a problem of how you access the inner one. We are in the process of developing inter-connect techniques that will permit that to occur.

We've been working hard in the area of the liquid crystal material itself. I think we have found the solution to the problem of speed, temperature range, and it will be possible to use devices of this kind for direct pictorial display. Now the question of cost is uppermost in everyone's mind on a device of this kind. At the present time they are very expensive because the yield is low but we anticipate that with sufficient demand and sufficient quantity, the price of these chips will be the same as any other LSI chip. A good example would be the kind of LSI chip that you find in a pocket calculator. We expect that by 1980, perhaps 1985, displays of this kind will be available at a price comparable to what you see in the pocket calculator field today.

What is Hughes doing to place this on the mass market where DR. SMYTH: the price will go down?

MR. SEEBERGER: I guess the only thing I can tell you is that we have an automated integrated circuit facility in our Carlsbad plant, and we're producing these chips there. It is our intention to tool for quantity production. I think the application of this device is obvious, not only to a market like general 'aviation, but also to the commercial market, the home market, as well as the military market. We anticipate a large volume will develop but it will take a while., r-------------------

KEY ADVANTAGES OF

HUGHES

----

HUGHES AIRCRAFT COMPANY

LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY

G) n co

• HIGH CONTRAST IN SMALL AND LARGE AREAS

100 x 100 MATRIX ARRAY (10,000 PICTURE ELEMENTS)

o GRAY SHADE CAPABILITY UNDER ALL LEVELS

OF ILLUMINATION

• UNIFORM HIGH RESOLUTION OVER ENTIRE

DISPLAY AREA

• INTERFACE SIMILAR TO CRT TV DISPLAY

• LOW POWER, WEIGHT, VOLUME

FISH . ^1 DR. So you are going to market it commercially?

SMYTH: MR. SEEBERGER: That's right. In fact it's being manufactured right now by our commercial division.

HaVe you solved the ambient light problem?

QUESTION:

a

MR. SEEBERGER: Well, of course, this is display that does not emit light. The brighter the ambient light, the better you can see it.

do an aircraft instrument

At night we treat it exactly the same as we

-provide artificial light. We ran a series of tests. The reflec- tivity in our liquid crystal turns out to have the same contrast ratio as the white pointer on a typical aircraft instrument, and at night you know how the panel is illuminated on most aircraft, or by flood lighting from behind.

either by light within the panel And that's the way it will be solved. We've worked out other techniques such as a plastic wedge placed on the top of the display which gives you a distribution of light. There are many ways in which you can illuminate it at night.

Is it restricted to black and white and shades of grey, QUESTION or o you have a potential for color?

MR. SE EBERGER: It has a potential for color and we will demonstrate color ' —fey the end of the year, MR. MC RUER: Very good! That's a fine supplement to Parvis Soltan's talk this morning and is a fascinating and desirable piece of apparatus to consider. Let's start that consideration now.

As you're all aware, this Panel comprises a very diverse set of

people in terms of their backgrounds. I'd like to start off with

the first question. What advances in component technologies are

expected from someplace else (presumably, none really being

per se, that could have some general

developed in general aviation aviation application?

MR. RIDDELL: I'd like to talk about the fact that it's coming from

elsewhere for two reasons. Bob Noyce covered the fact that i would, but using Prof. Grismore's numbers, for example, the '72 volume figures of aviation systems are less than today's auto- motive volume; one day's automotive volume in just one of the companies.

The other thing is that despite an avionics system that may cost

still

$8,000 and the car had at most, $200 in electronics, you're

in general aviation vs $2 billion

million for

talking $100 to $200

the automobile. I suspect that real advances hardly ever come

the from within the industry from which they should come. Take the steam locomotive, for example. No steam locomotive manufacturer` still exists because they had a lot of pride and wouldn't go to diesels or- electrics.

We have got to stop thinking about transducers in the way we've thought about them. I think we're going to think very much as Mr. Seeberger just said. He's not going to think about a display, he's going to think about an IC.

I can't disagree. I'm a little afraid of 1" sq.

DR. NOYCE: circuits; it's going to be a while before they get down integrated to the cost of a 100 mil chip.

Thinking of places where things would be coming from: there's aways citizen's band.

as components, we look heavily towards the TV MR. FARRAR: As far industry and I think I see some breakthroughs in the new synthesized public service band TV. Also the FCC is opening up the 960 MHz that's going to help as far as components. As far as transducers, I'm sure we'll be looking at the automotive market. In fact, there's just nothing like the auto industry as far as getting low-cost components.

Anyone have anything to 'say about Jerry's comments?

MR. MC RUER: MR. RIDDELL: I was hoping that we could tie ourselves to the tail of the automotive industry. But the automotive industry may decide that they don't want to have anything to do with us--because of the control regulations of the flight FAR regulations and the quality aircraft. At one time DELCO used to make all of our generators and they finally told us to take our business elsewhere and they'd give us. And this, I think, is us all the tools that they had made for going to be a problem that we're going to have to face as far as equipment. I think that we in the engine business are going to have to depend on the automotive engine.

MR. HOLLAAR: I too see the auto industry as being the high volume, low- cost market that is going to be the big source of device technology.

be a number of timing I thought also that possibly there will functions performed in advanced avionic systems that could be from some of the developments in the watch market.

applied Also, in terms of timing and control, the market is 'developing

rapidly in appliance systems. Here you have completely different

or not these are really going to environmental problems. Whether really take commercial specs and just be applicable, whether you can operate with a very conservative system design, I'm not sure, simply but those aretwo areas that can provide technology to general aviation.

On that point I'd like to go back to Frank's comments-- MR. MC RUER: none of us picked it at the time--but his remark on the appliance up industry being environmentally, fundamentally different, or likely to be, from, say, automotive or general aviation, in terms of engines. Is it not the case that the aircraft engine and the automotive engine share a remarkable similarity in their environ- ments, especially if it comes down to automatic engine control systems and things of that order?

MR. RIDDELL: Yes.

You've got emission control and fuel control and

we do have one other thing that I don't know if they have yet or

not, the turbocharger control. If we can make this work we expect that we'll end up with a single control for the engine/propeller combination. That means now you have also to control the propeller at the same time. But, yes, there is a_lot of similarity between the automotive and the aircraft engine as far as the basic working of the engine. It's just that we have different criteria or different areas that we operate in We don't have to worry about idle and startup because we tell the people that they should use supplementary heat when it's below 10U. The fact that nobody idles an airplane engine means we don't have to worry about acceleration because we're operating on a propload curve; we don't have the drag of the automobile so we've always got excess power for acceleration.

And the other fact that we're essentially a constant speed machine makes it a lot simpler than

the automotive engine as far as these

controls are concerned. But it's a case of getting the types of

sensors to pick up the different parameters. That's the same as

the automotive problem.

MR. MC RUER: So there's some hope there for additional cross- fertilization. Bob, do

you want to address question #1?

Certainly the largest number of displays that are being DR. NOYCE: made now are for the hand-held calculator, and those numerics are going to continue to go on down inprice. One of the areas that hasn't been emphasized here except in remotely piloted the question of the data links. A great deal of

vehicles is

communications is just normal hand shaking. "I'm here and I A lot of the other data is indeed being recognize you're here.

over data link on the transponder: identification and

put

ask me how you can ever understand

altitude. My friends often those controllers. The answer is that there is so much redundancy

do is just distinguish that it's one of 10

that all you have to

from 1 to

very simple data link; send a number

a

messages. That's do. So I would think that what we're

that's all you have to

10; doing in communication could very easily be simplified from that standpoint anyway.

Another area that seems to me to be critical is maintenance costs. In terms of complex equipment, certainly the data processing industry has had a problem in space and maintenance and a high degree of what is going on now is such things as error correcting, so when a failure occurs the system still works.

Another one is diagnostic programs which identified which card you ought to pull out and replace by a new card. While this is operating you want to have something to tell the pilot that it is not operating correctly. I don't need to have full diagnostics there, but when you get down on the ground it's convenient to run programs to get the maintenance diagnostics to figure out which connector point isn't making contact now.

We're getting a lot more into computer control of machine tools,

in the sensors and the actuators that are used; that may be an

area to watch.

MR. FRANKLIN: I'd like to tell a story about actuators. When we first started to build RPVs I needed a small actuator and somebody overheard me and said that there's a fellow over

in

the Polaris program that knows all about actuators and why not

call him? So I did, and he brought a small hydraulic actuator

with him. It weighed 15 lbs and was worth $,,000. I said no.

I showed him a little plasticmodel airplane actuator and he turned and walked away.

So we went to the Chevrolet store and bought seven motors that are normally used to actuate the head lamps on the Corvette

because they were only $17.00 a piece. We bought these

because they had the right torque and speed characteristics for aileron and nose-wheel steering, etc., on the RPV. The primary said, reason', however, was because the counterman "I'll have to or three in the Bay area."

order some for you--there's only two

He said they never get calls for those.

What I'd like to point out here is that when we have large pro- duction runs of any item and pay any attention whatsoever to what we're doing we're going to get reliability eventually. I don't

get that kind of reliability in short production runs of

experimental hardware. So we turn to the automotive industry_ again.

I think the $1.2 billion potential market for the DR. SOLTAN:

elect ics display in the automotive industry is really remark-

able. If I were in the-industry I certainly would be committed

for the next three or four years to making advanced display

panels for the automotive industry. I'd like to mention the a lication of fiber o tics Some com anies alread are Tannin PP P Y p 9 p that, especially for the automotive industry.

DR-JAUMOT: I think you'd be surprised at how much fiber optics are actually used along the street today in automobiles and how much work is going on. I'm not talking about the type of fiber optics you're talking about. I'm talking about a way to get illumination to a spot.

MR. MC RUER: The driving force up to this point was mostly appli- cations. Of course, it's been noted to be automotive. Now, I want to follow up on this point with Frank again. What's driving you?

DR. JAUMOT: Everybody's leaning on us but we're leaning very heavily on t e data processing industry and the communications industry because they do much more sophisticated things in processing signals than we have been used to doing. So in those areas we have been relying very heavily on them. What's driving the automobile?

There are really three things. One is the requirements on the emissions and safety. There's no question that that's been a major driving force because now you're getting into certain things where there is a guarantee that to reach certain standards you require accuracies much better than we had before. Fuel economy is the name of the game and we are going to be in even bigger trouble if the present proposed law passes. There won't be any big cars to hold all these electronics that we're talking about. The third thing is that the customer has seen all this sophistication. By the way, we're also depending on the commercial industry, the watch industry, calculator industry, the appliance industry, and when you talk about number of operating hours per dollar, they're the toughest of anybody. I'm sorry we don't have a representative here.

We are depending on all of these people, but our driving interests are the need for fuel economy, the requirements on emissions and safety, and the desire on the part of the customer. This desire for a more efficient machine means also more sophistication all the time.

MR. MC RUER: Is there a desire for novelty?

DR. JAUMOT: Yes, there is a desire for what we call pizzazz but it goes deeper than that, MR. SEEBERGER: I'd like to make a couple of comments in connection with display requirements. In the integrated circuit industry, there is a trend, I believe, for larger wafers for LST. I know

that we're looking into the possibility of 3" wafers and probably

in five or six years it will be 4" wafers. I think this is some-

thing that we should-watc l i because we have plans for going to higher density in the technology that I described on the little matrix display. In fact, we will by this time next year, have 256

to the inch where today we have 100. And the larger wafer is

in one single

going-to make it possible to get a'flat panel display

piece instead of four or a multiplicity of them. If you're looking

at what advances in component technology is needed, we need an %ndus,try that can support a 4" wafer. There will probably be other applications than just the display device that will support it, obviously, or it will never go.

UESTION: Can you get a 4" cylinder wafer without any defects in it?

MR. SEEBERGER: Not today you can't.

DR. NOYCE The practical place where the integrated circuit business has worked is at the 30% raw yield point. If you get more than that you can integrate more and make it cheaper and if it's less than that the costs go up exponentially. I think the most telling thing that you commented on is that you've made 12.

MR. SEEBERGER: I didn't tell you how many we had to make to get 12.

DR. NOYCE: If we look at the size of chip that is in the 30% range, it has moved from a 25 mil chip 15 years ago, up to a 150 mil chip now! A factor of 6 in 10 years in linear dimension. We're not going to get large panel flat displays out of this industry within the time frame we're talking about. The reason for going to larger wafers is strictly economic. It is not larger chips, it's just handling 300 chips at once instead of 200 chips at once; that's the only motivation for that.

MR.'RIDDELL: Incidentally, in answer to one of the statements you made a little while ago, if you take all of the piston engines which are manufactured both by Lycoming and Continental (there are only two piston engine companies in the world, as far as that's concerned) you have about 20,000 a year.

So you need the technology also.

DR. NOYCE: MR. RIDDELL: Yes Very much so.

DR. JAUMOT: Bob made a very telling point thismorning. The industry was beginning to stew in its own juice because he had so many designs to do. I don't know whether the solid state industry or the data processing industry forced it, but the emergence of the microcomputer replaced all the customer ways of doing these ;things.

Once someone finds a good way to adopt that, there is no reason why you can't adopt that. You may have to use more memory but that's trivial.

MR. MC RUER: While it wasn't made all that evident, the solid state transducer business appears to be going much the same way in terms of its revolution; on growth, including the CPU kind of business Aren't we on a threshold?

DR. JAUMOT: We'd like to think we are but we're very nervous.

I have: considerable nervousness about being able to get all the hysteresis out of all the transducers we want.

MR. MC RUER: So what's the matcer with dither?

DR. JAUMOT: Dither is very widely investigated at the moment. There are many problems with dither. One question is what rate do you dither? We can get significant acceleration in one-third of the turn of the drive shaft. You therefore have to dither at a faster rate than that. If you dither too fast you'll get detonation because you've advanced it beyond the point too quickly. So it sounds like the automobile is a quick and dirty thing but it's a significant systems problem.

DR. De BRA: The question is components and I think one of the advances that's going to be made is in the way in which we think about com- ponents. You can start thinking of these sensors as chips--as being part of the electronics. It's going to continue to go on.

Any time you've got something like the pressure transducer becoming part of silicon technology you know that almost any of the trans- ducers will take advantage of things of that type. You can just bet that there are going to be accelerometers that are silicon technology kinds of sensors. We begin to think about components differently in that the integration of these basic sensing devices is going to become part of something which puts a more complex function together in one box. We're going to be forced to think about components as being more things combined at once. I don't think that's going to change the communications receivers and some of the RF kinds of sensors immediately. They are relatively newer than some of the other panel display information that are already quite complex in terms of the number of functions that go on in there inorder to get an answer out. But I think one area that we can 'really put some pressure on is one of the groupings that Lee showed: that of 7 sensors to get the orientation in speed, states and altitude. You don't need 7 sensors as separate distinct indications when we all know that one of the first things the pilot learns is how to cross-check these instruments against each other because they're not independent. They have to be interrelated because airplanes behave in certain ways--physical laws that are that if one thing happens something else happens. If telling you

you drop the that in your VSI right away. So I'think the two

things that are going to happen here that will' change our way of

thinking about components are 1) sensors will be smaller; 2) there

are some areas in the airplane that have not changed since 1920 in

the way that we think about components and these are the 7 groupings

I think it's one of the first areas that's going to get hit by it.

The idea behind measurement right now still is that if you want a certain piece of information you measure it; and yet, we've been using Kalman filtering for quite a while in some of the navigation areas. So we've been rubbing information against each other to try and milk more out of it than we get out of any one basic

measurement. You were showing the stellar-Doppler-inertial

combination, and, of course, there are many others where we're trying to extract from basic measurements more than that one

-

basic measurement itself would give, by combining them in a filter ing technique. What I think is going to happen here is that as we start to put more of these basic sensors into a small package, and if the computation really is not a problem area (I think that is the closest thing to a consensus that has come out of this thing so far--that computation is essentially free), you start taking more advantage of your understanding of the physics of the airplane and maybe using some of these sensors, not because they measure directly what you want, but because indirectly they contain the information you want.

I think it's interesting to speculate here as to which end of the general aviation market is likely to take advantage of that first._ I think whenever you depend upon the physics of the airplane you're depending upon your understanding of how it behaves; those modeling errors that you inevitably have will introduce another class of errors other than just the basic measurement errors. This may be tolerable in the smaller aircraft where you're used to paying much less money and having instruments that maybe aren't quite as accurate and reliable as you might have in something which has got the full treatment that we saw in thelarger packages. It may very well be that when you take these seven instruments away their cost is enough to cover a fairly sophisticated selection of electronics with these integrated sensors all put together. Then it may be that you'll end up with a lower cost, albeit comparable accuracy kind of a system, that wouldn't be acceptable in the business jet but would be acceptable in the 4-place light aircraft.

MR. MC RUER: To wind this up, I think the Panel has done an excellent job in covering this whole area. Most of what has been said really implies an evolutionary sequence--one in which current functions remain functions and are simply replaced by better, more reliable, or integrated ways of doing it. I don't know any _answer to this but before we leave this subject I'd just like to ask a more general question: Is there anything in any panel member's experience that leads to the inevitable question, "Now if the FAA would only do this, or if the general aviation manufacturers would only do this, a whole pile of problems would be completely solved, or at least completely changes?"

DR. NOYCE: dust a thought on pan's comment here. If I'm not mistaken the FAA says that you will have an altimeter (a single unit), and a compass, a certified this-and-that and the other thing, and I just question whether if you did bring in an integrated system that measured pressure temperatures, etc., and you derived everything else from that, whether it would be accepted anyway. Could you write your specs functional instead of by pieces of equipment?

MR. BOROWSKI: Always it's the intent of the regulations. If you can provide altitude information with something other than an altimeter the answer is "Yes."

REMARK: The way the TSO is written today you even have to have a pointer.

That's specifically mentioned.

MR. BOROWSKI: Well, I think your question was if you could present altitude information in some way other than as traditionally been done, certainly the answer is "Yes."

REMARK: But that's not really true. If you make an altimeter that shows altitude and doesn't have a moving needle on it, it won't be TSOed because the TSO specifically calls out: You shall have a moving needle display. Now if the TSO is ages old that's fine but it is still the spec that we have to work under today.

MR. MC'RUER: All right. So it is possible that some of the regulating activities might have to move somewhat faster to keep up with the technology if it did develop.

DR. NOYCE: You asked if in our wildest dreams we had something to suggest. What I'm suggesting is that the regulations move in front of having the equipment there so that there is motivation on the part of avionics industry to find a better way to do it without the constraints that are presently imposed by the regulations. I would _love to see that happen.

DR.. De BRA: If I can rephrase your question, what you're really asking for is to change to functional, specs and that, as a single statement, would summarize most of the complaints I've ever heard about.

MR. BOROWSKI: I think that has a better chance of coming to pass particularly with the FAVs statements now that they're going to that have an air- worthiness review every two years. I think also what you were talking about--the needle on the altimeter--is an out- growth of the only 'way they had to make one years ago, and it was a good display. I think that they can be changed if you can come up with -a good solid argument against them or for an alternative way of doing it.

MR. MC RUER: Let's turn to question #2, which is probably going to be capable of being addressed much more rapidly. The ques- tion is whether we can identify any components that are being developed for some other industry group that could be made applicable to general aviation through component modifications.

This has a subsidiary question associated with it: which ones of these should be developed by NASA or evaluated by NASA? This is the first hunting license question we've had.

MR. SEEBERGER: In our area of the liquid crystal dis p lay we already are tied in with NASA in the respect that we re about

to go under contract to investigate interconnect techniques to

put a number of small modules together. It's a study of tech- nology, to try to find a way of doing it. That's the beginning

of the kind of thing you're talking about and we'll be under

contract for that in another month.

In the technology that we're talking about for solid state dis- manufacturing methods if solid play, there needs to be support of

state displays of that kind are going to be developed rapidly. We

are attempting to get support from other agencies.

I'm afraid. I would disagree. I don't think that's

DR. NOYCE: —7— fruitful place to explore. The contacting problem is easily handled by a multiplexing display and perhaps the multiplexing of the liquid crystal display is a more fruitful path to go instead of worrying about attaching 500 wires, which is an impossible task.

MR. SEEBERGER: No. I'm referring to the contacting problem when you

have more than four modules making up the display. The multiplexing

is already being addressed The next addition of our display will

have the shift registers built into the edge. So instead of 100

wires you

have one or two in your clock. So that's well under way,

but there is the question of how you get to a larger area if somebody

wants _a 10" display or a 6 1 ' display out of a 1 1 ' module, which_ is the

current state of the art right now.

MR. FARRAR: Since temperature is so important in the aircraft and

in avionics, there are things on the market today called heat pipes, but they are so expensive we can't afford to use them. I can see

that NASA could spend some time coming up with a low-cost type of

heat pipe so that we could cool the radio rack more efficiently, and

maybe a heat exchanger to the outside world to get rid of the heat.

Gyros are notorious in an aircraft because they are mechanical; a

lot ofeo l e have beun working on non-moving-part both rate p p ggyros,

and position

gyros, I think now that they are probably a gleam in

somebody's eye to be used in military-type application but I think

they have good possibilities in general aviation:; DR. De BRA: Just one comment to add to what Jerry's saying about

the gyro area: because of the tremendous drive that you have

on reliability, both in commercial as. well as general aviation, the angular accelometer developed at Syston-Donner, for example, has been used as replacement for some of the body-mounted rate • gyros in the 727 fleet. They started putting them in as replace- ment units about seven years ago; they mounted an angular accelo- meter in a can and just used some electronic integration on it to

get the angular velocity. It won't go down to d-c, but in the

band where these things are used for stabilization, it's a fine

replacement and they package it so it's plug-in replacement.

Apparently, the MTBF on that is considerably higher, so in some

applications I think there is a lot of room for what Jerry is

suggesting.

DR. JAUMOT: As Jerry mentioned, you could develop a $10 replacement

for an equivalent gyro and accelometer; I think that's one of

these wild dream things though I can see a lot of applications in

the automobileindustry.

MR. MC RUER: I was just going to turn to that. We have a couple of variable stability cars that

we use for handling experiments, and

it's the nicest thing on earth to change what we Ctall the stability

factor or the oversteer /understeer properties of the car with a

stability augmenter essentially using a rate gyro. Now if you guys could only use that on all your cars then you'd solve our

problem. You give us a good rate gyro we'd be in great shape!

and

DR. JAUMOT: It occurred us but we can't get that under $10. We do

to

need a correctional stability. We'd like our steering ratio to be

exactly l/V2 and it turns out not to be very easy to do mechanically.

I'd like to go back to that point about NASA support. I<feel

agencies need to support, primarily on the basis of three things: seed money is very important; they need to support where a mission needs to be accomplished; and they need those cases where

to support

there is a viable social reason for it and the market will not

support it as such. But to support something that there is a good

market for is probably unnecessary. I don't think Bob Noyce is a

bit more interested than I am in selling engineering, which is what

happens government contract.

so often when you assume a

MR. MC RUER: That's a very fundamental set of points, especially since

so much of the technology in this area will come from places that

have exactly that attitude.

I have often felt that the integrated circuit was more

_DR. NOYCE:

motivated by the fact that there was a market for the output of the

industry than by any of the money that went into the development of

the industry by the government.

DR. JAUMOT: The early performance of semiconductors were motivated by the military requirements for performance. But there was a lot of money put into integrated circuits. That was not the real motivator and many of the advances came completely aside.

DR. NOYCE: In many cases, I think, Frank, it was a deterrent to advances in the industry because the thing that was supposed, and engineers were taken off the thing that should have been done, were those things that the company would not do themselves; and if the company would do it themselves it wasn't supported. There was the forecasted most profitable path to take by the people in the industry. It was the sidelines that were supported and they amounted to approximately nothing.

DR. De BRA:_ Bob, can I ask a question that would be consistent with Frank's guidelines, namely if there is a mission to be done it wouldn't be done any other way. In general aviation there is a small market, and it is an awfully big investment to develop a particular chip. Some of the chips that are developed are not usable anywhere except in certain kinds of communication or navi- gational receivers that are unique to aviation in general. Is it of appropriate for NASA to get involved in something that type?

DR. NOYCE: Well, I guess I challenge you to point one out.

DR. be BRA: Okay. Jerry, help me out. You're presently using some LSIs.

MR. FARRAR: Well, I'm not trying to shoot you down, but we don't need you to design that kind of chip today. Collins has the capability, Bendix has the capability, we now have the capability to design our own chips and we are in the process of making our own designs. We do not fabricate the actual wafers; we take it to the mask-making point and get out of the loop. When we get the die back we pick it up from there. So we're probably in a better position to define what goes on that chip, DR. JAUMOT: Challenging you on the basis of the fundamental physics, you'll certainly agree that a vehicle is a vehicle, and communica- tions are communications. The modification is that what is .

developed for one will do for the other. I don't really believe that general aviation meets my guidelines of what needs to be done.

DR. NOYCE: The integrated circuits that we used in the computer had no military or NASA money behind their development. There was a lot of money that went into integrated circuits for Apollo but that is not what was used in the computer.

MR. MC RUER: I think you've made this point very well. Whether it's seed money or to meet a mission, or for some social good, those are perfectly adequate criteria and whether it applies to general aviation will depend probably upon the eye of the applier. Frank, did you want to add anything more on the first item in question?

In other words, any component being developed that could be used by us?

DR. JAUMOT: I'm sorry that I said there's nothing in general aviation.

I do believe that there are some safety aspects which are not going to be worthwhile in the eyes of either the pilot or the company supplying.

MR. RIDDELL: In regard to heat pipes, that has also been brought up for use in the aircraft engine to get the heat out of the engine.

As has been stated before, the cost is going to be prohibitive and the application is going to be a monstrosity. I don't really have anything that I could definitely say NASA should be into.

DR. GRISMORE: I think it's interesting that we're here on a Panel like this. We're talking about the use of technologies other than our own industry. I spent a number of years in the Federal Systems Division of IBM in which we were constantly bombarded with the idea: "Can't you use something from Commercial Division? They make so many and they make it cheap." And we said, "No, obviously not; they have completely different requirements. Our requirements are completely different than theirs and we're not even going to think about them." And the not-invented-here syndrome has hurt techno- logy, I think, in terms of many industries.

In any event, I said I wanted to tell my Intel story: along the lines of not-invented-here, I was actively involved in memory development for years and became an avid proponent of thin-film memories--a loser. At one of the magnetics conferences, outsiders were invited to discuss competing technologies in about 1968. Bob Noyce's cohort, Gordon Moore, was invited to present the semi- conductor competitor's point of view and he got up at the conference and he said, "Gentlemen, I come not to praise you but to bury you."

We were memory people from years back, and we thought that would never happen.

They didn't know anything about this industry. And sure enough, they buried us as thin-film people and they buried the memory market--at least the CPI market that were talking about we then.

The semiconductor industry is a fantastically versatile industry.

You need to look outside. I'm impressed that we're really serious about looking, into other areas._ If, you look at the problems that we've got-, functionally they range all the way from analog to digital; frequency-wise, all the from d-c to microwave-- way fantastic-spectrum--and there is single technology which solves no all those problems for everybody. We have technology such as dis- crete devices and analog ICs, digital ICs, each with their own area of utilization. The problem is as has been raised: is there some way that these diverse concepts can be addressed with bits and pieces from the auto industry, from the watch industry, from the hand-held` ;alculator industry can all this stuff be brought together to make some kind of a usable system? I'm opposed to the concept of designing special purpose LSI chips to do the job we're talking about. I think that's foolish for the kind of market we've the avionics industry t got. It would be a transition for leave the idea of printed circuit boards and sockets and go to a concept of hybrid microelectronics where one can integrate major functional unit. What diverse types of chips into one hybrid microelectronics offers us is the ability to provide high levels of functional integration so that if I can use Noyce's 8080 and somebody else's high frequency wide-band amplifier and so forth, _I can integrate them into a single functional package to do a job which makes serviceability and maintainability much easier.

Now I have one basic functional module which I can identify with some part of the system. In overall reliability one has the significant improvement under the techno- possibility of making a logies that we're using now. This is not a new technology. Hybrid microelectronics started well before the monolithic technology, I guess. It simply did not have the versatility. But I think it's _a technology that has some usefulness to us.

One thing I must bring up is that if you integrate MR. FARRAR: all that, the part that you integrate has to be able to fail such that the aircraft people can buy that module without having lost to pay the same price as he the total function and without having originally did.

DR. GRISMORE: That's right. So your level of functionality has to be defined in that way. Of course, Quasar has done that in the

the TV

printed circuit boards and I guess everybody else in

five major

industry has done that; there are something like four or functional boards in the color TV system. When the serviceman comes, his satchel has four boards the symptoms are fairly indicative of

plugs a new board in. He sends

which board is wrong; he pulls out,

to have it refurbished at a central

the old board back to Chicago facility and the newest mods are incorporated into the board when it's refurbished. That's not a bad scheme.

King Radio Corp.

MR. FARRAR: That scheme is being used today.

as a replacement board program, My point was not that the problem in reliability and DR. GRIS MORE: the problem of integrating diverse technologies into one functional unit is better done at a high reliability level. I think it might be better done in 'a hybrid microelectronic technology than in a PC board socket in one -solder technology.

In microprocessortechnology I want to 'make my list longer than bi- polar, and.I z L but he left out Bob's. He suggested PMOS, NMOS, CMOS. I like CMOS for aircraft systems'. I think CMOS has some advantages in terms of high noise margin and low power. It's maybe bigger and the not something we push hard on, but as avionics get problems of heat dissipation increase, ,I think that that's more a admit.

problem than people have been willing to (GRISMORE Cont) Transmission gate technology is natural with CMOS and this gives you some multiplexing capabilities right within the technology

so that you don't have to mix technologies. It's compatible with

j 12 to 14 volt system bus and it's easy to come down from a 28- volt bus with minimum regulation problems. I think the power system problem is very real. It provides compatible driver levels for liquid crystal or electrochromic displays that we talked about. We're talking about driver displays in the 12 to 15 volt range. Now I know that there are some field effect LCs that we can talk about, 2 to 3 volt, but when you talk about the problems of contrast ratio, at least at the present state of the art, 12 to 15 volt drive levels are much better. The main

f

factor with CMOS is cost and maybe the automobile industry is interested in CMOS. I don't understand why they might not be, but that would be a driving force. So somebody else would have to want to use it and I'm not sure that NASA can do anything about that. That's got to be industry acceptance: In displays, I don't particularly like liquid crystal It's better than most anything else but there are still problems.

What are your display requirements? These are my requirements

at

but I think they are typical of the industry. If you look your engine parameters, you basically want multicolor kinds of that, and right-

displays; red, yellow, green; any pilot likes

multicolor

fully so. There is a lot of engineering involved in

displays for engine parameters.

Flight maintenance instruments typically black & white

are although there is some yellow and blue involved in some instru- ments. In the engine parameters, we're talking about moving

bar displays plus numerics in flight maintenance moving bar

display, possibly some numeric graphics. In navigation, we are basically talking about black & white. I've talked to a lot of displays, people about this, and they don't like red navigation they don't like green navigation displays; black & white gets rid of the problem of danger, caution, and is safe. It's neutral. And there we're talking about graphic and numeric capabilities.

You've seen all the display technologies, LED, plasma, liquid

crystal the whole 'gamut except one which is a-very recent

technique using material called PLZT. This display is similar to liquid crystal in the sense that it's a light control display.

It makes use of the electro-optic phenomena that's inherent in this

particular transparent ceramic material The advantage of the display is that it is not a heterogeneous liquid-solid combination.

It does not have the potential temperature problems that liquid

crystal has, and it does not have the potential long-term degradation problem because it's simply a layer of three soli(

and glass, with some tin oxide trans-

materials, glass, PUT, parent conducting kinds of things. I think this is a technolc which has the potential of being really viable in all of indu: and maybe NASA can talk about development here. That work, bj way, was originally done by Land & Thatcher.

Are there any comments upon some of Lee's proposals MR. MC RUER: I don't have any argument with you on CMOS. CMOS is DR. NOYCE: coming in now. I don't feel it has the enormous advantages-b^,,.

it depends on the way the market goes and whether that 'becomes the most economic thing or not.

One of the things that could be developed here is software and which are easily transferred from one group to another algorithms so that once they're developed they can be a building block for everybody else to use_. There isn't any proprietary technology if it is indeed published, so you don't have the problem of building up a capability unfairly at one place at the expense of the compe- tition, etc. I believe that trying to figure out how to do the digital systems where they could be used, and precisely what algorithms you're going to use for control, etc., could be very usefully done by an outside agency.

We're talking.about a lot of goodies that possibly MR. FRANKLIN: could be sold if they existed now, but because the general avia- tion market is so small, we'll require somebody else to develop them. At the same time, we're asking what NASA can support NASA tests can fall _into the goody category or the necessary category. We have not talked very much about the necessities.

For instance, NASA should support things more related to safety, which I further broke down into engine health requirements rather than navigation and flight control. I haven't heard much about engine health.

We have such things as EGTs-now and the ability to switch from

cylinder head to cylinder head; but one thing that is not being

offered for sale is a system which would continuously monitor each individual cylinder health and trend, and display what's going on. Another thing that NASA probably should do is concern itself with inherent stability problems, basic airframe configura- tions rather than microprocessors to improve display.

MR. MC'RUER: You mean you want to improve the basic handling characteristics of general aviation aircraft? In other words, basin aircraft, no control system association, or avionics?

MR. FRANKLIN: Yes.

MR. BOROWSKI: I think you've got the human factor in the pilot who's the airplane too. I know of one case where there was a flying red warning light i n the cockpit the pilot complained than

and

this blinded him, so he put a piece of tape over it and that took

Care of it--warning be damned. We've gone through an air -worthiness

change right now to require double locks on baggage doors in the

front end of the fuselage because one lock came loose. The reason it came loose is because the pilot didn't bother to lock it, so they're going to put another one on so that he doesn't lock that one. It also signals back into the cockpit to tell him that he hadn't locked it and we found the wires were removed. So I don't know how far you can go on trying to make safe aircraft as long as you have the computer in the left seat.

MR. MC RUER: It is probably worthwhile emphasizing a little bit more

those things that have not really received a great deal

of attention in this meeting thus far; things which enhance either the pilot's confidence in his knowledge of the situation, his capability to or

cope with the situation. At one end of the spectrum this would

certainly include things like simple onboard computational capability.

For instance, it's been pretty well demonstrated that humans are excellent estimators of individual conditional probabilities. Now Bayes' rule is an easy thing for a computer to handle and you could

just plug in your estimates of the component probabilities and out

would pop

the desired answer.

On Question #3, should NASA support other developments, that other- wise couldn't be done without some seed money?

MR. FRANKLIN: I don't understand why that's such a wild dream. For

we have a transponder on board; that transponder ought to

instance,

be expanded and the other electronic items cut down. The transponder

should be a two-way data link so almost no voice communication's

going on--just voice communication for exceptional purposes. When

your clearance is amended, it should come out hard-copy, or on a flat plate readout so it's there and you don't have to remember what it was. If it's all done properly and there's a good up-link too, the transponder could accept steering signals and all the RNAV-equipment the airplane could be kept at center and the only

that's now onboard

thing transmitted up is the Go Left, Go Right signal

ili DR. NOYCE: I was trying to hint towards that when I was talking because certainly terminals of various computer

links

about data nets have been handshaking and acknowledging messages and identify- ing themselves and making requests for a long time and it's expanding.

That technology is one that could be used in the communications environment here very easily. I don't see any need for a printer.

We're going to have an alphanumeric display somewhere, I presume, within this time period. The printers are unreliable compared to soft-copy displays.

computational problem in collision ,avoidance there's

There's a

data existing within the system as to where the airplanes are.

is to sort through that data and present

The only question then

is appropriate to his flight. I do

to the pilot the data that think that general aviation has quite _a different problem than the air carrier does here. He is spending a lot more of his time in close proximity to other airplanes. I watched the gliders over is a reasonable separation. I fly through

Mission Peak; 100 ft

them with a power plane too.

DR. GRISMORE: Of course, some of your basic ideas are at the`

is being worked on

of DABS Discrete Address Beacon System) that now and it's probably going to come to pass,

Well, since we're talking components and since I'm

MR.FARRAR: reliability more than anything else, what I would ask

looking for

up with a nice low -cost method of burning in or

from NASA is to come

testing avionics, whichever way you want to call it, that would me a probability that I'll find greater than 95% of the

give

instrument failure components before I ship it out the door. That's going to save me a lot of money and that's going to save the people lot of money.

that are buying the equipment a

MR. MC RUER: You said 95%?

than 95%. _I'll take 100 if you can give it

Greater MR. FARRAR: to me; the highest probability that I've got all the infant failures out there I can get.

do 'get?

What do you estimate you

DR. NOYCE: -85/ MR. FARRAR: 80 long do you burn in?

DR. SMYTH: How

been built and align it

We take a radio that's just

MR. FARRAR:

against a working system. It then goes into a burn-in room and it

44* and back and

is actually cycled from room temperature to plus

turned off and on. This goes on for 96 ,hours. The radio then

is

comes out and gets aligned once more to meet the minimum performance

r

specifications and the covers are put on. We then take it to cold temperature and test it and make sure it meets the minimum perform- ance specifications; then to hot temperature and in this case it's +55, make sure it meets the minimum performance specifications. We then shake it; this is not an extension test, it's more a case of putting it on a paint shaker to make sure the parts aren't loose.

It then goes back into another 48-hour burn-in and has to go through cycle without any failures. If it does then we ship it; that burn -in if it doesn't it goes back through the procedure of being fixed, i.e.,

through the hot, cold and last burn -in. It has to go through the

Last 48 hours failure-free before we ship it.

MR. FRANKLIN: Does that explain why the automotive radio cost $70.00?

How long are they burned in?

MR. JAUMOT: Depends on which ones. The AMs are burned in only on a lot basis. Premium sets are burned in from 24 hrs up to 96 hrs.

sampling

what he says. We test them off the table and we On avionics we do just arbitrarily chop off the top and bottom. I would like to see NASA do those things Bob was talking about--get some new way of doing something that might be in opposition to the present regulations because those regulations are a great barrier to the average industrial firm.

MR. MC RUER: Okay. The Panel's done its job I think. We will have an opportunity tomorrow as Agenda Item 2 on the Workshop discussion and Panel interaction. However', if anyone has any all-compelling statement that they'd like to make about anything that the Panel has said today,

and you would like to get on record now or start the argument now, T

think we can devote about another five minutes to it.

MR. LUCCHI: Let me speak on collision -avoidance. It isn't the computa-

tion problem, it's a sensor problem to sense the other aircraft and to

make sure you can sense them in all directions. So the computational

problem is simple; it has been solved and demonstrated. But the sensor

is a difficult thing to do. Where do you locate it--where do you have

the antenna patterns? There is no good DFing on airborne equipment

that determine his direction or his actual location; only closing

now

velocity at collision -course, that's all. That has been the problem.

MR. SEACORD: In regard to collision- avoidance, Honeywell has a system that has been demonstrated and it prevented all the collisions between helicopters, whereas there were about one or two a month before that.

So I don't think thecollision-avoidance thing is an insoluble problem.

I think the problem has been that the FAA has not wanted to allow it to

be done by airplane -to- airplane and wants it to be done by pilot-to-

ground control.

MR. MC RUER: I'd like to thank the Panel members once again. I think you all did well.

SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE PANEL CHAIRMAN DR. SMYTH. PANELISTS: Messrs: ANNIN, BAIL, FENWICK, GORHAM, MC CALLA, OSDER AND SEACORD.

I'm pleased to find so many outstanding people DR. SMYTH: on the Panel. I feel that the diverse backgrounds of the panel members will contribute significantly to our answering the three questions with which the Panel is charged. I've put an abbreviated

form of those questions on the board: (1) Our consideration of

systems architectural concepts which are applicable to general aviation avionics, (2) What impact will systems control standards

have on the system architecture, (3) What guidelines can the Panel

suggest to NASA for the general aviation avionics study that is in progress, and that Dallas Denery described to us yesterday.

I'll just remind the panel members and other participants which primary functions we're considering in this avionics system: navigation, communication, identification in the sense of ATC identification, flight control, guidance (the outer loop aspect of control, whether it is automatic or through flight displays), and lastly, flight management including fuel management, flight planning, both before flight and perhaps unscheduled changes during the flight. Another issue, that hardly needs mentioning is reliability. The system architecture-type issues include com- patability between the flight crew and the controlsand displays.

My experience in configuring avionics systems, is that the most difficult area is to get controls and displays. that pilots accept.

Ten different pilots give 10 different answers as to the answer for controls and displays.

Obviously, the interface among elements is very important; for a

digital system, how do we get the signals in digital form?- These interface problems are more difficult than almost any other problem. Obviously the degree and extent of redundancy and self-

test is a very key issue to the system architecture, both with

regard to what the hardware looks like and with regard to the software structure inside the computation elements. The applic- ability of advanced digital technology is a,key

issue and the

impact upon both digital technology and other technology on the

system architecture is something we're attempting to address, (SMYTH Cont) Before I turn the meeting over to the other panel members, I'd like to discuss the mechanics of how we're going to operate this morning. First, I've asked each panel member to address one or more of the three questions in short prepared comments. I would ask that during these prepared comments they tell us which question they are addressing. Secondly, we will ask each panel member to comment on each question separately following pretty much the same format that Duane McRuer established with the Component Panel yesterday.

But before the other panel members make their opening comments, I would like to make a few opening comments of my own'. Yesterday we heard a lot of ideas. We heard about a lot of new components, a description of them, how they work, and a lot of other concepts were presented to us. The objective of systems architecture obviously, is to organize a number of diverse elements to perform numerous functions to meet the system requirements. I've been involved personally in a number of overall avionics systems and it has always turned out that the unifying element in all of these systems has been the central computer complex. I choose those words carefully because I don't mean a central computer but a complex of computational elements or computers in which all the data resides in that computer complex and can be shifted back and forth.

Converting sensor data into digital form and then enjoying the resulting synergistic benefits is a key point. Now this syner- gism that results from all this data from the system being in digital form, is of both organized synergism, using such 'things as Kalman filtering to take different sensors and come up with system states, and also unstructured synergism which often isn't thoroughly understood when you begin the system design. In fact, it's been my experience that as you proceed and have access to all this system data in digital form, you come up with crucial modes and functions which are important to meeting requirements that are now possible that you hadn't thought of when you began.

Well, computers have been with us for a long time. Why suddenly is general aviation avionics ready for the synergism of digital computers, and the synergism that military avionics has already experienced? The answer's very simple: microcomputers are inexpensive and becoming more so, as Dr. Noyce pointed out in a very graphical fashion yesterday. I'd like todefine a few terms regarding microcomputers since this is a key technical area.

You've all heard the terms microcomputers and microprocessors.

First of all, ` a microcomputer is an organized collection of'LSI components, usually MOS LSI, but as Dr. Noyce pointed out, using other technology also. These components include the microprocessor (SMYTH Cont) or central processing unit ECPU] (different companies call this element different things but it's basically the microprocessor).

Then there is data memory, random access memory which, so far, has generally been volatile so that if you turn off the power you lose the memory. Then there's the program memory or the read- only memory which is non-volatile, and a very important type of memory particularly used in the development of s y stems: PROM

programmable read- only

memory. One of the exciting things about

components is the input-output or peripheral chips that Dr. Noyce

talked about as being very expensive to develop these days. Each of the companies that make these kinds of systems have a variety of special purpose 1/0 chips which, in themselves, are micro-

a

processors. They have limited instruction set and they off-load the main central processor, getting some of the detail housekeeping processing out in the peripheral area, rather than in the processor. These include chips to interface with displays, key- boards, telecommunications elements, which should help with some of the data link functions that we discussed yesterday and parallel latches so parallel data can be sent in and out of the computer, and other very specialized types of devices. In fact, one company's even working on a special chip to interface with the CRT displays

so that all of the refresh and other housekeeping functions'

associated with interface with the CRT is available on a single chip.

Now the important thing is that these building blocks are available

here, now, today, and the chips are inexpensive (not necessarily

the integrating into a system). I think that a fair question to ask is: Who makes them? The answer is almost everyone However there are three companies I feel that sort of dominate the market at this point: Intel, Rockwell, and National. They don't necessarily dominate the market in terms of having all the ideas but they have the dominant market share which is always important.

Motorola is certainly coming on strong and fighting to get a bigger share of the market. Companies like TI and RCA have thrown

their hats into the ring and will probably become a factor in the

Then there are a number of market, but are not a big factor yet.

innovative companies with small market positions whose products deserve attention but they're too numerous to mention here.

There are a number of different types of microprocessors There

are 4-bit microprocessors that have instruction cycles of 5 to 10

microsec or 8-bit microprocessors with 2 to 4 microsec and then

there is the so-called bit-slice microprocessors that can be

word you want. Some of the newer

stacked up to get as big a as things coming along are bipolar microprocessors that generally have

150-300 nanosec instruction cycles. The features of these exist-

ing off-the-shelf microcomputer family of chips really permit

almost an infinite variety of system architectures for us to consider

and there are obviously many problems in implementing general

aviation avionics that are not answered by the microprocessor.

The amount of time I spent talking about microprocessors doesn't detract from these other problems that have to be addressed such - as actuators, better RF elements, interference problems, EMI and the need for low-cost sensors, particularly those in which we can get digital information into the computation complex. However, I still feel that the digital technology represents the unifying element in what we're trying to accomplish. So with those comments, I'd like to start on my left, with Jay Johnson.

MR. JOHNSON: I'm Jay Johnson from Beech Aircraft. I'm responsible for the avionics installations in the complete line of the aircraft.

Maybe I should give you a brief outline of how this is done at Beech. We totally customize 100% of the heavy and light twin aircraft, and we customize approximately 70% of the singles. We produce approximately one of the heavy twin aircraft a day, which becomes quite a problem because we do this on a production line basis and a production line schedule and the task of the interface becomes quite complex to meet a schedule. So I'd say that for the advancements of the 1980's high on our priority list would be the simplification of the interface. With the increasing demand for the sophisticated navigation and communication systems, the general aviation manufacturer is pressured by the customer's request. That leads me into the topic of systems architecture. After sitting through yesterday's comments this is a rehash of what we went through but I had already prepared these notes so I'll read them.

I'll start off with systems architecture concepts applicable to general aviation from other industry segments. This is a tough subject because most industries have an impact on general aviation.

For instance, the computer industry with smaller, more compact computers, better reliability, less power requirements, is a `must' in today's general aviation avionics. The plastics industry with lighter weight packaging, antenna build-ups, tougher wire coating, radomes, and many other by-products necessary for the avionics industry is essential to general aviation. The electronics industry with new concepts of microprocessors, multiplexers, LSI chips and many others, will play a big role in the avionics of tomorrow. Even the industries that do not manufacture a product used by general aviation, purchase aircraft with avionics and then feed back valuable information.

On the industry controlled standards impact of systems architec- ture, I would speak to this with somewhat of a forked tongue as I'm opposed to hard and fast standards because they stop progress_ in any new design. However, some things must be controlled. One of the bad situations we have in avionics when we customize is connectors. It seems as though about every manufacturer has his idea for a connector and own we wind up with about one whole crib full of tools just to be able to put one airplane together. We (JOHNSON Cont) build these in three different plants so we have a large connector inventory. So I'd like to see a_uniform standard for crimp-type connectors. Another standard we should get to is needle movements and loads. For instance, the linear deviation varies from one to four miles depending on the manufacture and/or the system. Some

manufacturers with one or more systems have two different loads

for the same linear deviation. I'd also like to see standardiza- tion of autopilot servo capstans who would installation

allow

during initial rigging for a much simpler and more reliable system.

This could also allow an airplane manufacturer to design better pulleys an.d control cable routing for less friction loading.

The third item: guidelines for systems architecture for the NASA General Aviation Avionics Program. The basic guidelines for NASA should be no different in the 80's than they have been for the past five years as far as general aviation is concerned, because the requirements to advance the state of the art always exist. How- ever, the following would be my suggestions for items to be investigated: the use of a minicomputer to tune and control functions of navigation and communication boxes; fully electronic displays vs mechanical displays for better reliability and more compact indicators; equipment. that can accept tougher environments.

The avionics boxes in most pressurized general aviation aircraft do not have the advantage of being installed in a pressure vessel.

Therefore they are subject to heat, cold, altitude and moisture.

Heat and moisture are the greatest problems. It is not uncommon to have temperatures in excess of 160° F on equipment that's located in the instrument panel when an aircraft is sitting on a ramp on a hot sunny day. This would indicate that the TSO and RTCA standards are inadequate. I'd bike to see better lighting design

for instrument panel displays, such as coated dials that would

reflect in black light, liquid crystal, LEDs, and probably several others.

The ability to control systems without the use of interfacing wiring or a minimum of wiring is important. We presently have 600` to 700 wires running through the forward pressure bulkhead on a heavy twin-aircraft. This could and should be substantially reduced. By minimizing the number of boxes per system a certain amount of redundancy would be eliminated within the system. For example, many autopilot flight director systems use two or more computers to perform their required function. The flight director

computes the raw data from the navigation system and feeds this

information to the autopilot computer and displays. The second computer is redundant.

(JOHNSON Cont) The antenna system could possibly be built into the skins or the fairings of the aircraft. After all, no matter how good the black box system is, if you don't have a good antenna system you're out of business.

So in summary, general aviation manufacturers design and build an aircraft that meets the public's demand with the most space available for the passengers, fuel, and baggage. Unfortunately, the avionics gets the space that's left over. Therefore, I would say that the task for NASA participation in future avionics would be miniaturization and reliability--with high priority on reliability.

MR. FENWICK: I think it might be appropriate for me to,follow Jay's lead and give you some idea what my function is so that you know what sort of poison darts to throw in this direction.

I am responsible for the development of system concepts and

new products. I-am in the business aviation (so-called) product

line of Collins Radio. I'm quite interested in the emphasis that we've heard in the last two days on microprocessors, and it reminds me of an incident which occurred a couple of months ago. We saw a seemingly learned article in a rather prestigeous trade magazine, a statement about what technology, such as aviation and avionics.

microprocessors, was going to mean in article was a prognostication that it can only The climax of the be a matter of a few months or perhaps a year before some enterprising manufacturer introduces an RNAV with a micro- processor as part of it. Well, since we'd had one of these on the market for two years, I found it rather disturbing that apparently there isn't too much awareness of what is being done inside these boxes in the avionics industry.

I had some difficulty with question (a,) because when I think of systems architecture I think of a detailed response to require- ments in an environment, and if anything, they're getting more specialized. Five years ago in business jets and turboprops, it was almost universal to have Arinc radios, e.g., the same radios that the air transport airplanes had. There has now been to have air transport a divergence and it's relatively uncommon radios in these airplanes. Now we and other manufacturers are developing special lines that are more appropriate to the size, weight, and certain other functional constraints of these ai'r- planes, and I would project further proliferation of this; the overall system architecture in avionics shows differences between military, air transport, business, and general aviation.

VENWICK Cont) Agree that microprocessors have a lot to offer. We'll be using them in a number of places that make sense. We think of them just like any other component, and if we're thinking of systems architecture at that level, certainly that has come into general aviation avionics from other industry groups. I agree totally with what we heard yesterday--that our quantities are so small that the idea that we could be the forcing function for any basic device technology development is out of the question. This is a cross we're going to have to bear indefinitely as far as I can see.

About Question (b) regarding standards, I can certainly sympathize with Jay's remarks about connectors and the interface with the

airplane. As far as standards within avionics systems as might

so on, I

relate to such subjects as data exchange formats and

think this would be a uniquely poor time to undertake standardiza- tion activity in the industry because we're undergoing a rather

dramatic transition to a very different way of doing things and it

could have the stifling effect that Jay referred to.

Question (c) is the one which intrigues me and makes me want to go back to an event that occurred 15 years ago last month, when I interviewed for a job at Collins Radio and they were telling me how great it was going to be to work in this avionics business.

They said my first assignment would be to develop the concepts

for EADI and probably just after that we'd get to a projected

headup display, and no telling what exotic things thereafter.

Well, I found that (with some pride, I might add) for 15 yearn

I've been able to prevent the company from spending any significant amount of money for any of those and I do think it makes a point, however, that it's all too tempting

(and we're all guilty of this)

to get fixated on gadgets in this business because it's so difficult to deal with concepts.

What NASA can do in my opinion is to pursue the more revolutionary

concepts where it isn't so clear there's going to be a payoff. I

want to give you at least one example of such a concept: I've

been a student of accident reports for a number of years and I had

a rather disturbing privilege of going over a bunch of very smashed

instruments just a week ago. 0 think the trend is very definitely

as

toward accidents in which all of the equipment is functioning

designed, the ATC system is functioning as designed, the pilot is

totally oblivious to any problem being present, and ground is

impacted. This brings into question of how cockpits are organized,, what happens to information? That is to say, the basic concept

implicit in today's cockpit is that the pilot on his own initia-

tive, his own instigation will, on a timely basis, make himself aware of the information that's being presented to _him and take-

perform

the initiative in pushing buttons and turning knobs, to a manner implied by the flight manual.

in

I think it would be an appropriate function of NASA to question whether this is the ultimate way that a cockpit should be organized,

seen as an information system. The beauty of digital technology is

that we can now manipulate large quantities of data in cockpits if you can figure out what data to make available, and so it is con-

ceivable that the pilot would no longer have to be a one-man band

under the communication load we talked about yesterday.

I think that an appropriate function then, would be to think about

the concept feasibility studies of revolutionary ideas of cockpit automation in selected areas the communications area, an area that I've worked in quite a bit and the navigation area, seem to lend

themselves to it. And I challenge the industry and NASA with the

concept of a totally automatic navigation system where there is a gauge, if you please, on the instrument panel that simply tells the pilot where he is at all times with respect to meaningful reference points. This means he doesn't have to fool with pushing buttons.

I believe that this is fully practical today and is something that

the ramifica-

some people have to do a lot of thinking about-- all

tions and the ins and outs. Since it doesn't clearly lead to cash register bells for very many people in the avionics industry, I don't suppose then, this would be something for NASA. I think that such work would not start out with simulators or airplanes with

CRTs, keyboards, and lots of computer capacity. It starts out with

the smartest people you can find, perhaps with a little bit of the

mad scientist tinge in talking and thinking about the subject,

diagramming and modeling and so forth, before he does anything that

someone can point at that's a fancy simulator, and say, "Ah, ha, fancy airplane."

MR. GORHAM: Chuck, I'd like to comment that nearly everything

you've said, _I probably would have said myself, so I can shorten

this. It's very true that the first thing you do is sit down and

figure out what you want to do before you start playing with gadgets.

That's the message that the panel gives to some other NASA organi-

zations doing research in a similar area.

I've been closely involved with navigation and flight control systems

for about 34 years now--in airplanes in Europe and in

England and France. was responsible for the Trident program in

I

England, and several small airplanes. In this country I've been

with Arinc for a couple of years, and from 1967 to 1972 I had the

total responsibility on the L-1011 for all of the cockpit displays

avionics, electrical, and flight controls, which was a kind of

unique position and it probably hasn't happened before and maybe

won't ever happen again, but that's how it should really be'done.

(GORHAM Cont) Figure 37 was prepared in 1967 when the 1011 first started. I think that a lot of the messages that Chuck has given us are there. Some of them are engineering requirements which have already been started and it's obvious that whatever we do in the way of development has to minimize interface problems. We can no longer afford to pass the buck and say, "Well, I built the autopilot and it doesn't work with the NAV receiver." We can't afford that anymore with complex systems; the penalty is too great.

Closer testing doesn't need to be discussed here particularly.

is vital. Our Chairman has

Maximum pilot involvement I think said that you get 10 opinions from 10 pilots; you don't-- you get 11! But nevertheless, they are people that can be reasoned with and one of the reasons we've fallen into this trap is that we haven't reasoned with them. We haven't told them what our concept is and we haven't told them what we are going to do early enough.

The worst thing in the world you can do to a so-called expert is And he says, "oh, no to say, "here's how it's gonna be, friend.

involvement and agreement, since it isn't." So you can get pilot after all they're the guys that are going to use it. They do have to be ,in early in the game in the guideline phase.

I think it's absolutely vital to establish what your operational requirements are first before you fiddle with your electronic designs, whether it be microcomputers, displays or whatever. And that's the trap we've fallen into in the past. We've tri g ( to put together the flight director. (I agree with you Chuck. I wish that thing had never really been invented--at least in the form it has finally finished up in). If we step back today and c,risider what we really want in order to manage the systems, fly the airplane, we might find that there is a completely different set of instru- mentation that would be better. In designing the system to reduce in-service maintenance, here it says, make maximum use of self-test, maximum enunciations of failures; that was written in 1967. I should have put a line through that in 1968 because we had about 30-40% of self-testing in the 1011 system which we found didn't really do very much. It predicted failures with the probability of maybe 90%, it cost 35% more in weight and in price, and we finally caught on to the fact that with redundant systems you've

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DESIGN SYSTEMS TO MINIMIZE IN-SERVICE

INTERFACE PROBLEMS

PERFORiN! MA"IMUM CLOSED -LOOP TESTING PRIOR

TO SYSTEM DESIGN FREEZE

ESTABLISH MAXIMUM PILOT INVOLVEMENT EARLY

IN'TH.E PROGRAM

DESIGN SYSTEMS BY ESTABLISHING OPERATIONAL

REQUIREMENTS FIRST, ELECTRONIC DESIGNS LATER

TO Ml,^1IMIZE INTERFACE PROBLEMS AND TO ACHIEVE

OBJECTIVES IN A LOGICAL SEQUENCE

DESIGN SYSTEMS AND COMPONENTS TO REDUCE

IN-SERVICE MAINTENANCI PROBLEMS BY

MAXIMUM USE OF SELF-TEST AND LATCHING

ANNUNCIATION OF FAILURES

(GORHAM Cont) got self-test. If you've designed it properly as a redundant system it's going to know when it has an operational fault so you use that circuit and that logic and there's your self-test.

One of the other problems which I think Johnson's mentioned is do that you must this design in a more leisurely way, and do it before the airplane starts because once the airplane starts you haven't got time for anything that isn't certain. If you don't know exactly where your antenna is going to be, it's going to be wherever someone in the structures department is going to put it, and don't grumble later that the airplane doesn't work because it's your fault--you should have told him before. You have to think of all these things.

Even with a modern airplane like the L-1011, you are considerably constrained by industry and by user with the spares and the equip- ment he already has as sensors. If a major airline has 700 VHF/ NAV receivers he doesn't want his next airplane to have a com- pletely new type of receiver. So while we do need a big advance- a ment in sensors, we have to be careful it's done in somewhat of progressive way so that you don't suddenly finish up with Beech` or Cessna or Piper trying to sell an airplane that just isn't compatible with a bigger operator's spares situation or with the distributor.

As far as industry influence is concerned, in the commercial industry we have a similar although somewhat different influence.

Arinc quite obviously has considerable influence about what we can put in airplanes'; the standardization is both a friend and an enemy. That could be debated later on, maybe in the panel dis- cussion. As far as the manufacturers are concerned, that is,

Collins, Sperrys, Bendix, etc., the state-of -the -art data deve`iop-

ment cost and the number of the strategies affect what they're going to do too. So i,t would be nice if what NASA was doing was done out of that environment and then there would be a big scramble for what NASA produces but it would sort itself out. RTCA obviously has influence with minimum'_ performance standards which are TSOs.

(GORHAM Cont) Incidentally, I came across a very modern helicopter the other day that had two flight directors and nothing connected to the pointers.

When you switched the power on, the pointers disappear; I thought that was great. That's the best system I've seen yet. I'm not decrying the flight director; it has a lot of uses, but if you're going to use automatic pilots, make up your mind what you're going to do-- don't expect the flight director to monitor the autopilot. It certainly doesn't in modern aircraft. It's connected to the same computer. The 1011 has a fairly clean cockpit but with all the best standard instrument panel, intentions in the world, we still have a mainly because we weren't prepared in time. Even if we had been, if somebody'd said, "Here's a nice display you could use," I'd want to know all sorts of things about it; has it ever been tried with the system? Has it ever been flown? Has it been hooked up, tested? I'd ask a whole lot of questions before risking the company's money by putting it into an airplane.

Figure 38 shows the application of new technology in general aviation.

First, it should be used to improve navigational capability. I'm not sure if it's agreed on as far as Chuck suggested, but certainly you have to have a flexible NAV system. We developed some pretty horrible things today called Mark II RNAVs which have a whole lot of keyboards and they're great except they don't handle the flexible situation and the workload really starts going up when you get into an unusual situation in air traffic. Obviously, accuracy should be improved. The more accuracy we can get out of navigation, the more people we're going to get into air space and the better we're going to operate. Navigational capability being improved would help the IFR and low visibility operation. It would let you getfurther down and get better operation in weather.

As far as flight control is concerned, one of the problems there is workload. Flight control can help the workload considerably pro- viding it's designed right. If it's flight control that keeps lights flashing on and off, then it's no good; it'll be turned off or a piece of black tape put over the light. Flight path accuracy again, can be improved with good flight control in combination with navigation.

Modifying basic airplane response is quite interesting. I don't know if this will happen soon in general aviation. I imagine it might happen in the next two decades, with some smart guy trying to beat the competition on a fairly advanced jet aircraft by modify- ing the characteristics and get better DOCs or low approach speeds or whatever. He'll use electronics in a critical mode to modified carping, or even produce a control configured vehicle. This may still happen. So we mustn't say that isn't going to happen. That's a farther-out objective but it's something that should be looked at.

APPLICATION OF NEW AV I ON I C SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY TO GENERAL AVIATION IMPROVE NAVIGATIONAL CAPABILITY o FLEXIBILITY o ACCURACY o IFR/LOW VISIBILITY OPERATION.

IMPROVE FLIGHT CONTROL o WORKLOAD o FLIGHT PATH ACCURACY o MODIFY BASIC AIRPLANE RESPONCE o IFR/LOW VISIBILITY OPERATION ENHANCE SAFETY o WORKLOAD .o PRECISION FLIGHT PATH o BETTER STATUS, INFORMATION FIGURE 38 (GORHAM Cont) Enhancing safety must be the objective of the application of technology, especially in general civil aviation. Again, you can help considerably by keeping the workload low. Whatever we invent to put in the cockpit must not increase the workload, it must decrease it. We can get safety if we have better pre- cision flight paths; the pilot being able to fly more accurately.

Obviously, he must know where he is and have good information that he is doing all these things.

What does improving performance really mean? As we talked earlier, on the 1011 we found it meant a lot of things: If you just added something to an airplane to improve performance you had to take, account of pilot skill. For instance, if you add a new system, the FAA will want reasonable demonstration that the guy can use it-- which is not unreasonable to ask. The pilot's skill level: does he need extra simulator training to do it? Does he need repetitive simulator training to keep up to date with it? That's a fairly big cost factor. At the moment it's not a big factor in general aviation, I imagine, because simulation isn't used, but as your systems become more advanced, that's what is going to happen.

Maintenance. The airplane manufacturer and the avionic manufacturer' isn't going to be able to sell anything that's not maintainable and it ought to be better than the one before. I don't know what you're doing in general aviation but in the commercial airline field, there are hard and fast guarantees and they just can't afford to have low maintainable systems or low reliability systems.

I'm not sure self-testing is a way to go. I think you should explore different ways. You remember the story about the box with nothing in it, that was told by an airline man and that was meant seriously..

So let's be careful with the self-test we put in let's show that it really means something. The best self-test in the world from my point of view is what the pilot can do simply as a pre-flight check and the more that they can tell you, the better, rather than pushing the button after the event.

Basic airpleirie design modification. If you really put advanced systems in an airplane you're going to come across a problem

that

you haven't hit too much yet in general aviation. For instance, if you go for an automatic landing system for Cat III you are going to modify aircraft wiring, plumbing, connectors, special wiring to install, segregation of wiring, and special mechanical racks which wouldn't have to be there if they weren't performing a critical function. You'll have a whole new gamut of things. So before we get into that mode of operation in general aviation, remember that it has a lot of penalties. That doesn't mean weshouldn't start.

But it means automation to get there.

Certification* I think there are just two or three of us in this

room that have had experience in the commercial industry of certi-

fication of redundant systems and it really shakes you up when you

realize how much effort there is involved. For instance, on the 1011 autopilot alone, to cover the automatic landing Cat III, 160 engineers spent nearly full time for about four years--something

like 300 to 400 man years, just on the design and development of the

autopilot and the failure analysis. So if you can find some way of getting your failure analysis program arranged so that that effort doesn't have to be done..., but at the moment, federal requirements and good common sense, demand demonstration.

Summarizing then I've mentioned on the first point, compatible displays and controls. As far as I'm concerned, combatible means that the pilot is advised properly that the system's operating

correctly or if there is an abnormal or emergency situation. Also

the controls are easily identified there can't be any misuse of them due to their being close to each other with the same shape; in other words, human engineering and consideration of the opera- tioval role of the airplane. That's what the pilot will for;

look

it's what any reasonable airplane company looks and that's what

for

the FAA certainly looks fora

As far as the interface among elements, I mentioned earlier we can

no longer afford to pass the buck of the proper pilot system air

space operation to the other guy. If we're responsible for dis-

plays'we've got to go talk to the guy with computers.

MR. OSDER:- I've been involved in guidance and control technology

instrument systems, computer technology, and so on and I'd like

to address the subject a little bit more from the perspective of the unique requirements of general aviation In the last couple

of days I've seen concepts and block diagrams that show all kinds

very

of remarkable things and, of course, there's a tendency for a

large gap to exist between the block diagram and reality. As a

matter of fact, a few years ago I wrote a computer program that

would generate block diagrams for anything you wanted; that was to put the block diagram drawers out of business. The problem can

be stated though, in terms of the historical role of systems

architecture. In the 1960's when you probably saw the first pro-

it was quite apparent that there was a lot

liferation of avionics,

of dupl°ication in aircraft and there was an obvious need to look

at the entire problem from a system viewpoint as to how to eliminate

some of the duplication. And with the development of the airborne

digital computer the possibility for integrating a large chunk

of avionics functions within a common' computer became quite noticeable. Those were the first applications of Systems inte- gration and standardization in the digital world for the aircraft.

The result of some of those experiences involved extraordinarily overruns that got into the newspapers. The costs were (OSDER Cont) something like the gross national products of half the nations on earth. New villains developed and the new villians were software.

We're speaking today of digital systems. Of course trends have changed; the centralized concepts have lost their flavor with the development of lower cost computation elements, so we now see a trend toward the federated system, but the only way you can hold the federation together is with good communication links between the systems. Therefore the interface has now become the key issue.

These are not

trivial. The computation elements associated with keeping those interfaces together are not trivial because software costs are still going to be the dominant problem. When we try to develop software that we freeze in ROMs we've actually magnified the problem considerably more than anything we've had in the past.

In the 1960's and even in the early 1970's, we used airborne digital computers with core memories that are easily reprogramm- able and they fly with the core memories. Even when systems become operational we see needs for changes and we do change those programs. If we have to change those programs in a ROM * the costs are high. You can do something with PROMS and you can do something with erasable ROMs. But still to mask a new ROM because you want

to make one small change in logic turns out to be a fairly

expensive task.

But let's get back to general aviation. Its unique problem is

cost. It cannot afford these $100 million to $1 billion type of

development probrams where system integrators are involved; soft- ware development houses are brought in to aid the effort. You

don't

have the time, you don't have the resources. So one of the

first things want to look at is general aviation

you what makes

avionics lower cost.

To begin with, general aviation products sell in the marketplace

for something like 30-70% of the sales price for equivalent func- tions of the commercial airplanes. And the environment is even more severe. If you sacrifice reliability it hurts. That obviously

can't be done; there are equipment warantees in general aviation

that are quite severe. If you send out a box and it doesn't work

to

you're going be hurt.

I drew up an interesting chart just to verify this (Fig. 39), and

it's the cost per lb for various types of avionics equipment. It

compares things like VHF, NAV-receivers flight director systems, DMEs, transponders radio altimeters and VHF transceivers, The trend seems to be scattered, yet in general, general aviation avionics costs more than commercial airline products. I'll show you a little later exactly why that happens.'

Therefare probably three main reaso is for that lower cost per lb.

If you look across the board you'll in

find that on the average, general, aviation avionics seems to be about $500/1b. Why are they

/

Q GENERAL AVIATION PRODUCT Q COMMERCIAL AIRLINE PRODUCT + eoo VHF 800- + TRANSCEIVER + TRANSPONDER RADIO + OME 700 + ALTIMETER w z * f / ^' + FLIGHT DIRECTOR SYSTEMS VHF NAV RCVR Coat Per Pound For Various Avionie Equipment FIGURE 39 (OSDER Cont) lower cost? What are the differences in the way things are implemented? First, there is less monitoring. As John pointed out, and a lot of us know, the cost of the built-in test equipment in the commercial avionics has been a lot greater than anybody is willing to admit and there are a lot of hidden costs in there that don't even appear. There are certainly reduced accuracy and performance requirements in the general aviation products. The arinc standards demand more than the TSO require- ments in many cases: in radios the power levels are higher for the Arinc standard for commercial airlines for various reasons, not necessarily that they need them. Things like the selectivity of channels in radio are the accuracy of the radio altimeter used in general aviation is a few feet less accurate below 100 ft than the commercial product. But the most im p ortant reason for the lower cost is the absence of standardization constraints. The problems that the general aviation aircraft manufacturer talks about--of engineering and tailoring a product toward his aircraft and the difficulty he has in trying to interface all the elements --could be a real problem, but the reason he gets lower cost avionics is because the avionics manufacturer for general avia- tion did not provide him with those complete standard interfaces.

As a matter of fact, the way you get a low cost general aviation product is by integrating a number of functions with unique interfaces just to put that total package together. So that if you want to build an autopilot flight director system for example, and you incorporate the air-data computer in that system, that air-data computer will have the capability of driving uniquely the displays that are being used in that system. It will provide the functions required within that computation complex and will meet just those interfaces that you've provided and will have very little capability of doing anything else or any kind of other interfacing subsystem, unless you do some additional engineering to tie them together. Now, there are things like the mechanical standards. You've heard the trouble we have with connectors; it probably cost about $1,000 to $2,000 more per box and a Tot of other'problems-to use standard Arinc co?^nectors. The non-standard connector approach saves a lot of money the general r aviation avionics. If you want to standardize, up goes your price,_ When we start looking at the potential in the digital technologies for interfacing equipment, the first thing that ,comes up, we see, is always the communication data boxes. Now we have some new prob- lems where integration might lead to cost increases. For example, here's a simple problem of, control and display talking to three subsystems via some bus interface. Now we're faced with this problem: any one of the devices tyin g into the bus makes the bus very vulnerable as far as malfunctions are concerned. In avionics' systems where we use data busses znere are much morecomplex isolated terminals. They are monitored in a mush more complex way and the cost goes way _up to try to minimize the vulnerability of (OSDER Cont) that bus. What happens is the bus can easily fail. Any one of those devices can start putting out spurious data on the bus and foul it up.

As a matter of fact there are a lot of ways of design- ing the bus. The easiest and most efficient one if you do a paper tradeoff study, is to make the bus a two-way communications bus.

In avionics, so data busses that transmit digital data had far, been one-way busses even from the beginning of the military avionics systems in the 1960s. A subsystem output spouts a lot of serial data and anybody tied into it receives it but the guy who receives doesn't transmit on the same line. So that if you can build a high impedance buffered receiver on any bus it's very difficult to fail that bus but once you have systems that both talk and receive on a bus are vulnerable to failures. Here's you the problem: If the bus fails and I have different subsystems, perhaps radios receiving a frequency select command for a control and display unit; if the busses fail I must still get these sub- systems autonomous and independent of the centralization. So there is a cost involved. I could build an autonomous interface here and maybe the radio can be tuned by the two-out-of-five tuning techniques that's standard in so many radios today. Then you've added the cost of the bus interface but you still have the autonomous interface so it can be treated independently or you can go to redundant busses. John, if you believed that the problem was difficult in terms of guaranteeing safety for wires and flight critical functions, you don't begin to realize what the problems are when you try to guarantee against failures on redundant busses; the reconfiguration of the busses; the switching of the bus and so on. Even in the larger avionics systems today like the space shuttle, which has a two-way data bus system and a lot of very expensive interfacing elements that try to manage that bus, they are probably because you have all kinds of concepts concerned with switching t bus fails.

u then it But failed?Iover w U transmissio thattoldyou it failed, or two, or three? What do.you do and what kind of logic do you put into the device that manages that bus? The software develop- ment for this is going to become very costly. These are real and difficult problems that lend themselves to solutions generally by the expenditures of great treasure that probably are not available in the general aviation marketplace. There are possibilities based on the appearance of the microprocessor and its incorporation in a product. The gentlemen from Collins has told us, Chuck, that he has microprocessor pikoducts. Almost all companies I know of have them. They've been incorporated from 1973 and 1974 on, but not in terms of centralized or large integrated systems. You use the microprocessor because it gives you a superior method of computing and you incorporate it.in_your product. But the problem of systems integration is one that has been solved" thus far by avoiding constraints of standardi- standardization and if you try to combine zation and still require intergration, the potential for cost increase is very high. However, if you follow the direction of integration without standardization, then you have the possibility foi the new elements in a low cost environment.

DR MC CALLA: After all these distinguished gentlemen, I have "Me too!" It's my order of priorities that we have to be If we're actually going to -control surfaces, fiddle with the enyme, and actually control the mixture. An engine's a very reliable thing, as is the airplane. Now if we're going to put one elec- tronics system in there it's going to have to be simple to operate and simple to maintain. It's going to have to be modular as we mentioned so that we start at $2,000 or $3,000 and then go on up to the business jets. It needs to be adaptable. Things 'keep changing. We have changes in technology; changes in government regulations in the NAVaids, we will have to be able to change what we plug into the computer system. Right now we have VORs and there is a big push to satellite navigation. Maybe in between there is a VLF Navy station.

There are a couple of points to mention. Reliabili ty. If we have a number of things and they all have about the same reliability, two of them that could only carry half the load are actually worse than only having the one. If we're going to add things in parallel they each need to be able to carry a good proportion of the load.

Our twins are counted in that predicament. Most of those twins can't really make it on one engine. They become a long range glider.

Let's go back and look at the development of computers for a minute.

First it was just great to have a computer and we tacked everything into it. Then as Logic elements became a lot cheaper we got into the situation that seems to be prevalent today where we stick our :decision making elements over all the machine and the central one could become a lot smaller. We have little local controllers on the input and on the output. Now as Bob Noyce pointed out, the logic is free. Logic is becoming _very cheap and so we can have multiple central processors. So it looks like we might have 'a little bit of a logic on output and input, and we could come back to something where we have multiple central units.

Loading. What isn't acceptable on a decision maker is if it goes bad you really don't know its gone bad. Only if it fails completely do you know it went bad. Experience in the hybrid computer lab is that a lot of times the digital computer doesn't just quit, it gives_ you erroneous outputs; kind'of like analog, like the OMNI systems in my airplane. The checkout, then, after I fly a couple of hours IFR are reading 5° apart. One of the pilots now have three OMNIs in his airplane. If you have two you can tell if they're working; if they both agree, they're working. Four gives you an operational redundancy. Maybe for general aviation if we're going to put a great burden on the logic, which we might because it is going to be cheap-=we may change the way we do things. Maybe we'll just do with three and let it tell the pilot when one drops off that he'd better get to the nearest airport, because he's in real trouble if he loses one of the two remaining. Some military situations like the system Teledyne's building, have four complete systems so he can lose one and still be operational.

Let's look at a system with four decision makers. We have the task list of things that the machine has to do and since ROM is cheap, we'd use PROM or read-mostly memory. But all the machines can do all of the tasks. They periodically check each other as well as themselves. All four are vote totalers. Each one of them totals the vote. As a team member drops out, you throw off some of the less critical tasks. The list of tasks is stored inside every machine, and when one of the machines picks up a task it tells the other ones what it's doing so that they won't do that task, and what you have is kind of a high overhead of machines telling each other what is going on. When you go to a little higher complexity you actually have to put in a supervisor. A multi-level hierarchical structurehas to have a coordinator and

you put some ofthe same structure in there to switch the coordinator

around to get your multiple redundancy. can't have just a

You

voting machine since the voting machine becomes critical; that's no good. You make them all voting machines.

MR. SEACORD: I started out in airplane and missile stability-control and moved into automatic control in general avi oni c systems, and I have been associated with the B-58 and the X-20 that was probably

the first fly-by-wire system scheduled to be built. I feel somewhat

like the last guy in a ski meet: the ruts have been worn and I'm

going to ride down those same ruts.

I think that people get killed in airplanes mostly because they can't land. There are engine failures but these are uncommon. I

think part of the problem when they are landing and trying to

navigate, is that the airplane is not a particularly good airplane.

Now I realize that shouldn't be universally applied but it certainly applies to some very popular light airplanes. There are some that wander all over, even with augmenters.

Desirable New Functions: They're got to adapt, to MLS. A type of

device that has been mentioned previously; a flight management

computer complex, that will tell the pilot where he is and even in

some cases, where he should point the airplane to get to his destination. I think that would probably involve a CRT display for the next five years or so. Now some of these things come from to operators of fairly advanced general aviational business

talking

aircraft. T include headup display because I think that for Cat II

landing, for anyone but the very well'-trained and highly used pro-

fessional pilot, the only satisfactory solution is going to be -a

headup display. I don't know whether it's going to come at the

right price or not, but I don't think you're ever going to get pilots

that can pop their head up and land the airplane in the last 100'.

The hard copy printer has been mentioned and perhaps it could be storage display that's not hard copy, but anyway, some- `a thing so that the pilot doesn't have to immediately absorb all the transmissions, but they will be theyt, for him to use at his leisure.

Reliab%lity: It needs improving, both MTBF and functional redun- ancy. The current light plane has a great deal of functional Yedundancy. The pilot starts down the glide slope and, as some- body mentioned, he can keep his eye on the altimeter and it tells him something if that doesn't look right. If, when he goes over :'ie marker he isn't the right altitude that tells him, if he at ► esn't hit the marker when he thinks he ought to, that tells m something. The pilot is the computer that's monitoring all ,nese systems. There's a lot of redundancy. If you integrate a system completely and make it the most efficient in terms of hard- ware you will lose all of that functional redundancy because you won't have the duplicate sources of information. So we have to maintain this functional redundancy and I think that means independent subsystems.

Cost reduction: Using low cost equipment tends to favor using a mature concept hardware. The data bus was mentioned. Well, the data bus may have weight and space advantages and in a lot of cases that can be shown very definitely. It probably will also cost more have more MTBF. We did a study on the NASA F-8 air- to plane, considering a pseudo-shuttle-type bus arrangement and the piece-part count went up and the cost went up because you had to have more piece parts.

If you look at the ,general requirements performance, reliability, cost reduction, and the types of technology we're talking about here, there is zero effect of improved performance on RF electronics because I think the current electronics work pretty well when they work. You will get an effect of the digital electronics because you'll get more accuracy in NAV and in display computation, or for flight controls,. The problem of building a that matter, in a great deal redundant digital flight control system is really easier than it is in analog because of the tracking accuracy. You out of can get all the accuracy you-need for general aviation current inertial sensors. You can't get what you runt with the displays now so there could be a large influence of new technology on the display in terms of improving performance. New functions in (SEACORD Cont) digital electronics have a high influence because of the possibility of doing things you couldn't conveniently or economically do before. All of them could have a high effect on reliability if the reliability of those types of hardware could be improved.

Incidentally, when I said I agreed with John Gorham on one thing, I want to disagree with him on something: I disagree on the self-check. In a digital system the self-check is very feasible and very successful; it may cost a lot to do the design work but it costs very little in terms of hardware. Computer and memory are low-percentage costs, certainly not the determining factor in the system cost. In inertial navigation 70% of the cost is in the inertial sensors; even for a flight director 40% is in the inertial sensors, and for the autopilot it is equal to the comput- ing costs. For ILS and communications, 75% is in the RF. The main point here is you're not going to get the needed cost reduc- tion out of digital electronics because if you eliminated all of it you'd still have a problem.

Back to the systems architecture for a moment: a dedicated approach has sensors and the computing elements, servos, and displays. Integrated systems are of two sorts: one has dedicated wiring and the other is the data buss approach. You have a minimum list of sensors; if you need inertia references you have one--you don't have one for the auto pilot and one for the flight director, and so on. Now when you do that you may end up having to put two or three of these whole systems in because you don't have the 'redundancy that you get by having an independent auto- pilot and flight director.

Now, an opinion of what I think the characteristics of those The dedicated system has fall-back architectures would be.

capabilities by virtue of the fact that it has some functional redundancy; it's easier maintenance and probably cheaper spares, because the spares are Less complex in themselves. One that hasn't been mentioned here very much but is very important: the software design checkout and control is much simpler, much cheaper, and much more certain. It may be inefficient; you may duplicate sensors, and it might lead to a higher MTBF, but one thing is, the computer failure will end up being small compared to the failure in the sensors and the display. The integrated one has its obvious advantages: you can size things and completely use the computer capability; you won't have an inefficiently utilized computer. Packaging costs will probably be lower and you can eliminate the duplication of sensors. If you're not careful you may lose some of your fall-back' capabilities The disadvantages are, _if you go to the completely integrated system, you're going to have to use parallel redundancy or high coverage self-check which does become feasible but it doesn't help much in terms of an inertial sensing or even RF sensing.

(SEACORD Cont) The software complexity goes up. [This is a wild guess of mine; I think it's probably N 2 where N is the number of subsystems you start tying together and running through one computer.] The troubleshooting is much more difficult. I asked a couple of pilot friends who operate airplanes what they wanted. They wanted more reliable equipment and they also added that they'd like to have some way of getting it fixed when it did fail. They said it was just like taking your TV set to get it fixed; you had about a 50% probability that it would be fixed.

Some trends: I think that the decrease in cost of digital electronics will encourage the use of dedicated computers. The low computer cost will promote the use of parallel redundancy and self-check, and under those circumstances the failure probability of the computer function would be negligiable compared to the other failure areas. New developments in inertial sensor tech- nology will offer improved capability and that comes back to what was mentioned yesterday. I think strapped-down sensors in con- junction with the new and cheap digital computing will take over.

Electronic displays are probably a necessity if we're ever to get the right amount of information into the cockpit without over- running both the space and the cost. Existing aircraft opera- tional data that is available now in an airplane (which the pilot calculate on his fingers or does whatever he 'does to figure out what it all means) can certainly be put into a computer and made a lot more useful Now in regard to some questions: I think the standards that were mentioned probably could be developed to some extent and I guess I don't understand why this should have such an effect on cost. I know of a couple of examples. We have a small radar altimeter to be sold to airlines. If you sell it to the airline they have to put it into an ATR box. So they went and bought an ATR box and this little altimeter sits in the middle of the ATR box; there must be room for four of them in there. That's inefficient in terms of space, but it turned out to be the most cost effective way of getting that so-called standard ATR altimeter._ So I think the standards could help, but I don't think they'll have much effect on system architecture, and in fact they might lead to a more varied system architecture because then you could literally plug things in where you wanted to and customize the architecture.

The contribution of otherindustries: We've heard about the digital electronics and I think that's certainly true and obvious. I don't see other industries except the communications industry that will help on RF. I think that's an important part of the problem. When you consider DME and MLS, even the popular communications industry is not ,going to help much; they are not in the right frequency. MLS receivers are going to be expensive because the RF front end is expensive.

As to suggestions for NASA work, I think that starting from a clean sheet of paper and aiming to reduce pilot workload with a complete display is certainly something NASA can do. The headup display is unlikely to be done by any avionics manufacturer and I think that would do more to help the pilot landing situation than anything else.

Other programs in the past have created very sophisticated panel displays. But those displays were expensive; they required very highly trained pilots; they weren't for the general aviation pilot.

If the general aviation pilot is ever going to confidentally make even Cat iI landings, we needs a better display and headup. I think it's the right way because he doesn't go through the transfer of his sensing. The inertial system integration and improvement, RF inte- gration, trying to cut down the number of separate RF front ends you have on the airplane, the number of sensor types is worth looking into.

In summary, landing display, working toward more reliability and improved RF and inertial sensors is something NASA can do.

MR. ANNIN: I'm with the Boeing Company, Commercial Division, up in Seattle; I'm also a general aviation pilot, and flight instructor with instrument rating. I'd like to speak first from a Boeing point of view and take a brief look at the architecture of two of the systems that are being built. One is the 747 flight director and autopilot complex, and the associated sensors and displays. A new thing is a Boeing 727 company-owned test airplane which is now equipped with a dual Sperry RNAV system with quite some capability.

There's nothing too unusual about the 747 captain's panel except at the bottom, there is a little switch that enables the captain to one of three integrated autopilot flight director look at any standard equipment on all 747s. In addition, compu t ers which is he's got switches at the bottom of his panel so he can look at devia- tions from the opposite side of his navigation receivers he can look at the second INS and derive his attitude source from the second system in case of failures. The integrated control panel which handles the mode selection for all autopilot flight director computation was originally developed for the SST and found its way into the 747 through the request of one of our customers. The 707, 727, 737s suffer from having three mode selectors to appiropriate positions.

Well, in the 747 that's taker) care of. The wings can only assume one attitude at a given moment and the nose can only assume one pitch attitude. So one mode selector controls all three computers.

The pilot can turn the flight director off, (ANNIN Cont) This is a switch that some of my friends will like--you can just turn the flight director off and use the raw data for monitoring.

In the basic airplane, unless the customer has some special require- ments for additional redundancy, there are two basic sets of sensors. INS is standard equipment whether you want it or not.

There are three computers all feeding into the automatic flight control system which is dual in the standard installation. But

if a customer is

interested in Cat III landing, a third channel is added with appropriate sensors.

The new 727 has a dual RNAV system and two digital computers.

The focal point is the computer. It has a disc-memory of about

156,000 words and you can store the location of every VOR in the

world if you so desire; the location of the airports that you

intend to operate

to and all the published way points of the

structured high altitude airways that the FAA has published. The pilot has access to that through his little control display unit.

There is an inter-system communications buss so that the two

systems can check on each other and alert the pilot if there's a discrepancy in the computation. Since this is an old fashioned 727, each pilot has a mode selector for his flight director, then a common mode selector for the autopilot. So there is just the one autopilot and the controls are not repeated on the other side.

The inputs to the RNAV computer at present are all analog; that's the kinds of sensors we have to deal with. There are five outputs from the air data computer such as altitude, vertical speed Mach number, air speed, etc., and conventional directional gyro and vertical gyro supply heading and pitch information. There's no bank angle information needed.

Another interesting feature is that all VHF Nav and Com selection is made through a push-button controller and when you're operating in the RNAV mode, which is normally most of the time, you don't do anything with that control because the Sperry computer reports to

you on the alpha-numeric display what frequency it's working on at

the present time. So you just sit there and it gets to the appropriate point and tunes in the next station. All the time the

pilot is monitoring the situation independent of the RNAV computer

because the RMI is dedicated to the VOR station which is tuned by

RNAV equipment, so he can always the bearing and

the look at

distance to the station that's being utilized by the RNAV computer.

When the pilot's sitting on the ramp, passengers getting loaded

and the pre flight checks are being made, he can setup the entire

instrument departure if there is one published, or he can make one up appropriate to the departure route he'd like to take. There are three separate phases: departure; phase which he selects on the ground. The'enroute: phase--if it's an airline company they

would use route numbers for all their commonly flown routes so

(ANNIN Cont) you don't have to go through and name all the way points. Just call up the route number you want and then if you have the time you can sit there on the ground and go through the flight way point by way point and examine all the route segments and all the altitudes that are stored. It's three-dimentional. The entire vertical profile can be programmed in advance. And yet it's easy to make changes. If you get a new altitude clearance you just punch a couple of buttons and she'll just settle down to the new altitude.

To make this convenient, Bendix modified the autopilot and put some push buttons on the control panel so we can select lateral navigation on vertical navigation and couple it in with the auto- pilot. We have about 25 hours of area navigation flight testing now on the 727, and about 75 hours for certification and proving on the customer's airplane.

I'd like to put on my Cessna 150 driver's hat for a minute and make some suggestions for the lower spectrum of the general avia- tion business--things I've been thinking about for quite a number of years I think one of the biggest things we lack is a realistic usable attitude display for a pilot who can't spend a lot of time on simulators and instrument training. I don't know what the answer is but I think it's something that NASA could work on. For example, you might conceive of filling up the door post on an airplane with electro-luminescent panels or something of that sort as display technology is coming along, driven by the vertical gryo

so that it fills in the horizon that you normally have. You know

how easy it is to maintain attitude and heading under VFR conditions, and when you are experienced on instruments this is no great problem; but it's that group of pilots in between that don't get the time and haven't had the experience. So I think something like this would give them a natural mode of instrument flight.

I have to agree with Buster on the need for a little bit of stability augmentation. I think that on an instrument flight, it's foolish to sit there keeping the wings level, keeping the heading in the right direction, and watching the altitude if simple electronic means can be provided to give the airplane directional stability; make it more or Tess hold the heading. I think that there are airplanes' the market that do this For instance, on Mooney considers lateral stability argumentation as normal. If you want to make a sport plane of it you push the button down and you can maneuver all you like but when you turn the airplane on, it's got directional stability and the wings tend to stay level.

I think the other thing that we need to work on is in the accident

prevention area. Up in Seattle we have two problems: One is

major

flight into rocklined clouds--you just don't know the mountain is

there and you run into it. The other is the stall-spin accident

(ANNIN Cont) that continues to be with us in great numbers. I think that some work could be done to somehow limit the authority of the elevators, get rid of the ailerons and provide a lateral control that always works.

MR. BAIL: The ground has been very well plowed. I'd like up and talk a l i ttl e , bi t about some of yesterday's

to back

this question of what NASA

discussion and ramble around should do. I would start out with the DC-3 which is an imminently successful machine. It probably put commercial aviation in the black, and it was an advanced machine for its day. The engines were reliable; it had the NACA cowling retractable landing gear, low wingconfiguration, monocoque constructed cantilevered; wings; (2) two engines instead of three and an NACA developed air-foil.

It was the marriage of a lot of technology and effort up to that time. I believe that's the way significant things happen in the avionics business also, The things which are particularly success- ful are the marriage of a number of previous efforts. Along that line it seems to me that NASA's role is clearly not that of product design. It also seems to me that it is clearly basic research; it should supply the avionics equivalents of better air-foils, of the NACA cowling, things of that sort. But don't go designing flight directors, a cheaper dispaly, a lower cost MLS receiver, etc. The

basic research necessary to fund the components needed for those

worlds has got to come from a much larger marketplace than that which NASA can provide from seed money. Now there may be a particular spark somewhere that the seed money can kick off. But it must be very carefully done.

The product line which NARCO makes are sensors in all the systems architecture we're talking about today: DME, COM, NAV. Suppose NASA contracted for super digital guys to design super digital all of circuits, and gave them to us and we got the electronics configure a business on that basis: functions free. Now let's Clearly, my engineering percentage of cost decreases. My electronics costs go to zero and I have only mechanical costs now.

In mechanical (I'm including such things as connectors, PC boards to hold these parts, panels, drums, frequency indicators, dust covers, shields, EMI and all kinds of good stuff), the cost savings to the customer would be somewhere between 20 and 30% and that's all, with all the electronics free. We've still run_ our sales force about the size it is today. We still must have production

We

control because we have to manage 20 or 30 lines -atone time.

have to have purchasing because of all the mechanical: stuff that goes in these boxes. We have the G&A cost, cost for building; all appreciable part of

those things are still there and they're an

the cost. So I think a lot of caution has to be used in where you

apply the money, effort, and thinking.

kBAIL Cont) Now, to follow that line of reasoning further, I say that salvation has to come from what we call system architecture.

I don't believe there's a supplier to the general aviation world who hasn't said "If I could sit down and make one box that had the COM, the NAV, the DME, the RNAV in it and I start making these things common, we could save lots of bucks." I don't think these isn't anyone who hasn't considered that as a possibility.

I could save money but-I don't believe it's a viable approach for a couple of reasons. One is, not everybody wants to buy the whole bag at once. A sizable part of the marketplace is upgrading: new transponder, meeting new requirements such as altitude report-

ing. The buyer may not be able to afford the full bit nowso he

gets one COM and one NAV, and then a couple of years later, perhaps, adds equipment. You can't afford to have the initial purchase be too dear. You'll shake a lot of people out of the market. The other reason is reliability. Functional redundancy just must be preserved. You can't afford to have one thing go and have the guy dead in the water. It's not practical to do it that way. Most people will appreciate it, but here's a case where we may have to do some protecting of the customer against himself.

I'm of two minds on all these things--I would like very much to stand up and endorse the big effort to make it easier for me to do something or make the world better; I think you have to be very careful what areas are attached. Arid so while I say I think basic research is where it is, I don't quite really know what basic research is. If you can invent something, like an IC or transistor- something of that sort that millions and millions of people are billions of quantities, you've done something going to use in significant. But if you go and invent a synthesizer or a VOR processor or a whatever to fit some airplane architecture, you're doing the wrong thing.

I'd like to make a controversial statement: I don't believe the -equipment needs more reliability. Perhaps it should be safer, but you've got to be Very careful in sorting out those two thoughts.

Reliability is mainly an economic factor. Safety is something else.` Let me illustrate what I mean here. Reliability is the classical MTBF kind of thing We make radios, with 1000 hours MTBF. If we did everything super in that radio, we might make that 4 orb thou- sand hours but it takes a considerable investment to do so, much more than 5 times the investment to make the 1000 hours; much more than five times the cost of the product. You've got a factor improvement in the probability of failure. It may be 3 or 5 times more reliable. So let's take this 1000 hour MTBF box, start charging around the air with it, and I say to myself, "Well, I'm five times less likely to have a failure than with the 1000 hour box; but with two of those 1000 hour boxes in there, I'm about 1000 times less probable to have a failure, and that would only cost me twice." So I can obtain functional reliability by redundant equipment much cheaper than I can improve the reliability of the box. Now, on the (BAIL Cont) other hand, the operator says, "Your box fails. It's down all the time. Gotta fix it. I keep pouring money into it." That's economics--but not safety. We must be careful in thinking reliability vs safety, and in my mind I was reading safety in a lot of the reliability talks. Reliability is mainly a cost factor but cheaper to maintain, is something else. You can get there by more than just making it more reliable.

I've had the opportunity a number of times to go through and apply operations research, system engineering, or whatever optimization you want to talk about to several areas that I thought were clearly non-optimum. They mainly were economically forced situations.

If you sit down and do a real thorough analysis, you reach some funny conclusions. And so I'm going to propagate Bail's law: An economically forced system, where the system is a result of a large number of seemingly chaotic economic or time-constrained decisions is nearly optimum. It's a hard thing to believe but I do believe that very strongly.

I have some things to say on systems architecture. The statement was made that you can't afford a system that won't allow revolu- tionary change. There's several things wrong with that. Not only would you have a severe reaction by the users but industry just couldn't possibly undergo revolutionary changes every time you wanted to change somethinq. The p ilot's training and his inertia must be considered. The systems and box designers think of the pilot as a reactionary individual; he is, and he's got good reason to be. You can give a guy a better altimeter display but if he was trained on a 3-pointer and his reactions are based on a 3 pointer kind of thing, his response is, "Hey man, I don't like that.

I'm trained. I'm used to this thing." There is the inside-out outside-in attitude gyro argument.: The guys are trained one way. Probably the wrong way, but they are trained that way.

At a,critical moment of approach, if he looks up and makes a response based on his training, he's liable to accelerate the attitude displacement rather than degenerate it.

Another comment that I really don't know what to make of. Buster proposes making all kinds of improvement for the bigger machines and the airlines are doing all those good things but it's a severe inversion of skill compared to the equipment we give the guy. It seems imminently stupid to me to keep providing 5" great big dis- plays for an air carrier crew, highly trained, competent, current, and put a little 3-inch hole for the general aviation guy to look into for an attitude indication.

Also in the area of things that I look at and feel are terribly wasteful, is that the navigation problem is really a very slow developing problem. What kind of bandwidth, what kind of real information rate is being transmitted to give a guy's position in space or his maneuvering situation? It's a very small part of up at least 10 MHz today, 50 kHz per we use cycle per sec and yet a OMNI station. That's terrible. For communication, we burn up MHz for an average, very low, information rate. We invest things.

If you want to get a more reliable, less difficult to operate communications system, why don't we just put a one-channel radio on an airplane and have the ground frequency move around to talk to him? The ground sits there with a multi-thousand dollar communications transceiver with one channel. How many of those are there in the US? The airplanes have got half a million COM systems up there--all of them assignable to 720 channels. This is not smart.

The only other argument you can enter into concerns the processor.

Processors almost have to be distributed. I think the simple pro- cessor concept has got to be very carefully looked into. Someone said, "Let's put the operational requirement in front of it."

Today, we say, "Hey man, we can do it. Isn't it beautiful? It's getting cheap." Why do you want to do it? What's it going to do?

The sensors we're talking about: VHF, LF, ^siagnetic heading, altitude, temperatures, those things, with included computation, do present a situation display if this processor is to do nothing but combine several things. You don't need a big processor for that.

Well, John, thank you for some very realistic comments.

DR. SMYTH: DR. De BRA: Dick, why don't you continue for a minute and let the Panel interact while we have you here together, DR. SMYTH: Okay. We're now 18 mins over our allotted period, but I'm sure you've all been saving up remarks that have been generated by your fellow panel member's comments. We'll give each of you one minute to vent your feelings. I'll start with Jay Johnson.

MR. JOHNSON: I would have to agree with you, Bail, on the MTBF reliability of 100 hours if we receive that. However, what I'm talking about is the failures prior to the airplane's being delivered. We're talk- ing about 15% failure rate in the house. This is what I'm talking about regarding reliability. Once the airplane's delivered, and the infant mortality problem is past, we are getting fairly good reliabili ty.

MR. FENWICK: I suppose the distinction you're making there is between

reliability and quality control. I remain remarkably free of

anxiety reactions in what I've heard here this morning. I was taken by Steve Osder's remarks about standardization's causing costs to balloon. A novel idea. I've never heard of it before, and I appreciate your having said it.

I've been most perplexed by the problem of.giving MR. OSDER: Dallas a positive recommendation for something NASA could work on. I've observed that each person made recommendations. For NASA that was furthest away from what they themselves were doing.

in research.

There are important contributions that NASA can make Of course, it's very hard to identify research with some of the practical reality we're trying to accomplish, but I do think that NASA has the facilities to accomplish testing in a fairly good environment that would actually prove the feasibility of many of the concepts that were discussed. NASA is equipped with a lot of the engineering resources that a lot of the rest of us can't afford to apply to these kinds of tasks. They have the flight research test equipment, the ability to record, measure the accuracy, measure the performance of devices or new inventions that people come up with, and I think NASA ought to exploit that capability and provide that flight research support to the new inventions that everybody would like to see developed.

DR. MC CALLA: It remains to be seen whether or not NASA ought to move towards the standard. Yesterday it was mentioned that IBM seems to be Snow White, everybody else is the Seven Dwarfs, and they follow along. Another group that's moving towards an international standard are the instrument manufacturers, and Hewlett Packard is one of the foremost of these. It seems as though the aircraft is more an instrumentation situation and I'd like to look quite closely at the instrument manufacturers' standards.

MR. SEACORD: I agree with what John Bail said about the display and the pilot. It would be very nice if the best possible display the cheapest airplane with the most inexperienced could be in pilot. Unfortunately, I think cost is going to prevent that but it certainly would be the right way to do it. On the realibility thing, though, I heard the same figures, only 1 heard the rejection rate from one leading manufacturer was 20% to 40% before it ever got installed in the airframe at the airframe manufacturer's plant. The man who told me this didn't know the reason, and he didn't offer a solution, he just said it. I would like to cite one example, infant mortality, and that is the digital data computer that Honeywell supplied for the DC-10 when they first built it. It was a Nightmare from Honeywell's financial standpoint and probably from the government's. It turned out that it was economical to go back to the right parts and do the right burn -in. They did more and put in than meet the requirements. They quadrupled the original after burn-in MTBF had been, by putting in high qualityparts and perform- ing a-rather rigorous incoming inspection and acceptance testing, so I don't think the cost of getting a reliable piece of equipment is necessarily what you described. Maybe that was a special piece of high cost equipment so that it couldn't be mademuch more expensive, I don't know.

I don't understand why it would not be entirely proper and useful for NASA to work at developing more means of getting RF efficient signals into the airplane: It doesn't mean th.ey're going_to design the product at all. But it could mean they're going to explore new ways of building synthesizers, new ways of doing other things and publish this just as they design airfoils. [Although they don't design wings for airplanes, generally.] It''s been very useful work..

NASA should not get into standardizations. I don't think NASA as an organization has the people, or the organization, or the back- ground to try and create standards.

DR. De BRA: Who should, Buster?

MR. SEACORD: Well, I think it probably should be some organization like

RTCA, SAE, or Arinc.

DR SMYTH: I'd just like to reinforce one of Bail's comments about functional redundancy. About

a year ago, I was flying a small

4-place plane on instruments from Dulles to Oklahoma City, and I

noticed it went for a

long period without any noise coming over the

speaker. All the needles were working so obviously the radios were working. There were two of them, but there was only one speaker and it had failed. Obviously, we have a functional redundancy in that case because we have an earphone plug, so I opened the case to get my earphone, but it was not there. That also reinforced his comments on pilot training. I was stupid.

MR. ANNIN: A little bit of a red flag came up for me when somebody suggested that headup display was the solution to any of our land .ing problems. Now Boeing has had some exper i ence with that. As you know, AOPA has been very strong for headup display. I don't know exactly why, but we finally got pressured into putting one in the 747 and we've done a lot of testing on it and that is a problem We've got very expensive objects, and very stringent sensor require- ments, to get the accuracy needed to overlay the flight path bar on the runway. Now I'd just suggest we forget all about the headup displays.

MR. GORHAM: Yes, I agree with you. They should be looked at with

caution. Regarding standardization from the airplane builders'

point of view, I'm -not quite sure whether the cost of standardiza-

tion balloon is because of the total cost you re dealing with when

you design the box. I don't know what the story is when you take

the whole airline picture. Now whether th'at's related to general aviation, I don't 'know. 'What I'm just pointing out is one part of

the story. I'm not sure of the total cost of balloons, otherwise

we wouldntt be standardizing. I think it's worth exploring the

redundancy and reliability question for a moment.

In 1961 when we developed the Trident triplicated system, we had a quick look at the reliability of the singl y channel a!topilot which we all had then. Looking back on every record, we found that the single landing autopilot, single channel autopilot would adequately meet the requirements of l 10 7 for safety. But you in just wouldn't do it. The'point of that is, let's just make sure that when we apply redundancy we don't just apply it willy-nilly on the basis of a math function. Let's be sure that we really do need it because once you apply redundancy, you've got two boxes instead of one, or three instead of one. The tendency is to let them get half the reliability because that's all you need for the redundancy and safety level and now you've got at least four or six times the problem on the operator. So there's a great big penalty to be paid for redundancy.

And then the final point: we really didn't discuss the attitude gyro yesterday. We talked about determining attitude with rate sensors and with inertial sensors, but the lousiest bit of equip- ment on any modern airplane today is the basic attitude vertical gyro, and the smaller airplanes won't be able to afford anything much better than that. They won't be able to afford inertial platforms foralong long while yet. Let's see if we can do some- thing like basic flight attitude.

The FAA is obviously very reasonable when you put something in.

The constraint is not so much the difficulty of meeting the FAA requirements or at least getting new reauirements which may adapt to the equipment you've got. For instance, there were no regulations for Cat IIIA automatic landing, when we started the L-1011 so we got together with a few industry people, and 3 months later we had :.

an acceptable means of compl ance and were all free to go. So it can be done. The problem is the question of how far does NASA go if NASA goes only to the point of demonstrating a system concept with non-representative hardware? There's a problem still because when somebody starts a new airplane, FAA isn't going to say that it flew around fine in that Cherokee that NASA had up there with that equipment that Sperry, Collins, and Bendix put in the program.

FAA isn't going to take any account of that, because it's non- representative and while a little bit of credit may be given, it would want to see that equipment in production form, getting some hours accumulated toit before it would say "Okay, go put in a new airplane." What I'm saying, is there's a development phase. If NASA wants to do work which would help airframe manufacturer the and the user to get new equipment, there's `a process the manufacturer's previously gone 'through, from feasibility to engineering development.

He's done all sorts of things to get this demonstration of reli- ability and performance, which is the evidence the FAA requires.

So how do we get that gap filled?

I think the first thought that occurs to me if NASA MR. BOROW.SKI: develops data, writes a report, etc., we put all kinds of weight on that. That means a lotto us and it goes a long way towards substantiating a production des,.ign. The burden of proof of sub- stantiation is always on the applicant. But when the applicant comes in with a NASA report, he's a long way home.

MR. VANDEN BERGE: I think the point is that the results of any con- ceptual programs that NASA undertakes that will result in changes required in the regulations must be communicated with the FAA to determine if there will be some regulatory reason that that con- cept cannot be implemented once the testing and development work is done.

MR. BOROWSKI: We have an FAA coordinator here.

.MR. GREER: There's a couple of things I want to make clear. One thing I've been concerned about a little as this meeting has progressed is that this group of people understand that the interest of the program which we are sponsoring here, is not product improvement.

It is not intended to intrude in the affairs of the general avia- tion avionics or airplane manufacturers relative to near-term objectives. The intent of the program is to project towards the five, six, or seven years, to the technology available then, and do some reasonably far out examination of concepts--both in terms of subsystem as well as total systems, in an attempt to lay up a store of information which will aid in avionics designers. We will do research work that is too risky for people who are in business for profit. That point I wanted to make, lest there be some -mis- understanding. From the comments and discussions I've heard, we're shooting a little short of our objectives.

Another point that I'd like to make plain is that NASA doesn't intend to fool around in the area of standards. NASA's intent is to provide some money and a little bit of a push for industry to get together and to reexamine the issue of standards to see if there is anything beneficial to them, which would drive either the cost, the maintain- ability, the reliability, or user ability in a favorable direction.

The third thing I want to make plain is the relationship with regard to the FAA. I say make it plain and I make it plain that I don't understand it. We recognize that what we do in terms of research must have some degree of practicality to it, even though we are talking about systems concept research five, seven, or ten years from now. To that end, we have sponsored studies to examine the environment. The system which we will work with would bear some practical relationship with that. I will say that the two

agencies cooperate. There is a very honest instinct on our part

to develop liaison with the FAA that will allow us to be of service.

What we really want to do is develop for the avionics industry another NACA catalog or its equivalent. The purpose of the Work- shop is to gather comments and opinions from you people which would aid in formulating that research approach, or that research program, which would develop significant steps in advance of general aviation. We are trying to spend seed money wisely, which will accomplish this, but to a large extent the direction we go and the progress which we'll make will be dependent upon the general aviation industry themselves. It is those people we'll go to for advice. This is probably one in the first of our series of Workshops.

MR. HOLLAAR: I`d like to address some things that haven't really been covered and I think they may fit in with what Brent has talked about regarding revising the old NACA catalog of designs. The (NACA) agency didn't dictate to you but helped you. One of the things we're seeing is that the hardware cost is becoming a negligible cost in the development cycle; the software cost is becoming more and more the factor in digital design. In this

regard it's possible that NASA could do a limited development of

the basic algorithms not the software; checking them for reli- ability; checking them to make sure they meet the requirements; indicating what accuracy is required; indicating what speed is required to execute these algorithms. This would aid immensely someone who is developing, for example, an RNAV system in that this basic development wouldn't be necessary. As navigation systems become more complex, like Omega, there is a tendency of having to reinvent the wheel or recalculate the trig formulas and figure out go to a catalog

what error bounds there are. The designer could

programs, much like one went to one's friendly of NASA NACA wing section catalog.

Another areawhich NASA could get into is human factor design of

displays. Very few manufacturers can afford the money and time

necessary to run the thousands of subjects to evaluate innovative display procedures. And it does require a large number of subjects, should be on a NAV instru-

e.g., to figure out what the scale factor

ment after you decide what the NAV instrument should be. We did a and I

lot of the work at Illinois in evaluating subjects for RNAV

tell you we've run hundreds of subjects through flight simulators; just to determine what the vertical and course deviation factors should be for RNAV. It's not easy process, not the type of

an

process which is easily supported by industry. It's certainly

(HOLLAAR Cont) the type of process that you want the standard result to come out. We find that scale factors are acceptable within quite a range but if every manufacturer came up with a different scale factor, the poor general aviation pilot--many of whom don't know the plane, rent a plane on weekends--would be at even more of a disadvantage because not only now isn't he proficient in one instrument, but he sits down and there's a completely different instrument. If this isn't attempted by some industry group, or by NASA providing seed money and basic research facilities, then we'll have chaos. Imagine the case of a VOR, sold by manufacturers who had different scale factors and different forms of instru- ments; how useful would VOR systems be to the general aviation pilot? Nil. Once an autopilot becomes more of a simple wing leveler how easily can the person .renting a plane, the casual user, use an autopilot? And now you're talking about much more sophisticated hardware, much more sophisticated displays. I say the productive area is to achieve some uniformity and to achieve what the pilot wants.

Another area, and it's really important, is the area of training.

We have no program for training pilots, no standard values of how to train pilots in air navigation equipment. Pilots aren't familiar with it. The saving grace of an ILS is that the ILS approach is tied to a piece of cement. They know that the needles are centered; there's a piece of cement in front of them. They don't have to set up anything. RNAV is a little spooky. It's not tied to anything. There's this transmitter which isn't really connected with anything on the approach. You twist some dials, and this black box, which they don't trust implicitly, and shouldn't, says that they'll arrive at an airport. It's a scary concept to many of them, and until that's adequately addressed, and that's only through training, these sophisticated techniques we're talking about won't work for the pilot. The pilot is still going to want to have some cross check which he's familiar with.

Another area is the training of maintenance personnel. There's how to way of training maintenance personnel, except no uniform we become more and more sew fabric or how to paint airplanes. As and that's going sophisticated, things are certainly going to fail in the field. And the to have to be repaired by the people who with aviation is finding a person standard problem right now that that box. And if we're not addressing knows how to repair and providing the training for the people in the field in area terms that they can understand, then no matter what we decide.

time it fails in the field, it'll be a failure because the first the thing won't be able to be repaired properly and all our work nought, will be for MR. MC RUER: Let's turn now to more general comments. Are there any points that we've missed?

MR. GORRAM: I think we've missed one point I mentioned earlier. We lightly-glossed over the attitude sensor and said that we'd either use a rate gyro, and integrate, or use inertial platforms. It's my feeling that that's the weakest link still in the lower cost airplane. Some research on just improving basic attitude informa- tion is necessary. You obviously couldn't certificate unless you had the basic means of measuring attitude--whether it be a gyro or a second-order gyro or an inertial platform.

MR. SEACORD: I'd like to comment on the suggestion made by Mr. Hollaar on the software. I completely agree with his suggestion on the software development. You can take specific examples, and I'm familiar with two types of systems autopilots (a little bit), and somewhat more recently, strapdown inertial navigations systems.

The software is intimately connected with the algorithms and the iteration rates are inti.mately affected by the hardware being used.

And you cannot design those things without knowing what gyro, what computer, or what airplane you use. For example, you can put out attitude at 10 per sec for one airplane and it's completely satis- factory. Or for another application, if you're going to mix it with MLS for that application you might have to have one rate don't mix it, and it might be another rate. The software gets to be too much tied up with the applied details of the hardware. And also, I don't think software is as big a bugaboo as it's been made out to be, e.g., the complete software including the most extensive self-check development I know of was between 10 to 15 man years on a particular autopilot program. This included the complete failure modes, checking out, etc., while our hardware development was three times that. So software is not the overriding factor.

MR. HOLLAAR: What about the next time?

MR. SEACORD: Well, the next time I would say that the self-check methods that were developed would probably be applied, and take less time: That project was a completely fail-safe single auto-pilot, but it had to have 99% plus self-check capability in it it had to be proved; and and it was. The next time we do it the effort will probably be half of what it was The hardware design will be just as great since somebody always wants a diffe-rent size box. Also, in another two years there will be different components available. You start all over again every time.

MR HOLLAAR: I want to say that I'm not proposing NASA write soft- ware for people, and I'm not proposing that if the algorithm can't be made specific, that it be made specific. But, if there are bounds, they should be indicated. People don't sit down and start from scratch and code square root routines; there's no reason why people should start from scratch coding navigation and flight control routines. Your comment that if you design the software today, it'd probably take half the time, in part reinforces my case. What you're saying is that there's a tremendous premium in learning how to do it once.: When it's been done once, then it's much easier. I'm saying that to help the industry, NASA can teach it the general rules for doing it once, and then from that time on, everyone's on the learning curve.

And at that rime, I agree, software won't be the bugaboo; it isn't for anyone with a great deal of experience.

MR. FRANKLIN: I'd Tike to ask a question in the area of reliability for a small aircraft. I rent one and I have some understanding of down time when an aircraft goes in a shop or gets fixed. I've wondered why aircrafts have to go down when it's radios are down?

Why can't a replacement program be instituted? The radio goes out and another one comes in and you're on your way and the broken one goes back to the factory to be fixed. The answer I've gotten is that most of the problems are in the harnesses. But why aren't the harnesses standardized?

MR. MUCCI: We do a lot of modification installations and this means that we just don't put in a standard package; we put in whatever the customer wants. If he wants an RNAV, a sophisticated auto- pilot, he's going to have to get the harness that goes with it.

Now you are talking about a small airplane which does more or less get a standardized package but still there's a variety and the number of harnesses and interfaces are tremendous, MR. FRANKLIN: Well it seems to me we've spent a lot of time on far-out ideas here when aircraft utility is a read problem. Maybe it's not very glamorous but a lot of money's involved.

MR. HOLLAAR I think one of the difficulties we see in harnesses

aren't with the original factory equipment' harness which are laid

out in a controlled environment. The standard cycle of general aviation planes is that a guy buys something, and then a year later when he has another $600, he goes to his friendly neighborhood radio store and he gets something else installed and the harness is then played around with to get this next thing installed. That's where many of the harness difficulties come; not from a nicely planned harness by an original equipment manufacturer, but by a harness wired by someone crawling under the dash who did it the easiest way he could because his back was starting to hurt. That's where your harness problems are._ MR. BAIL; An interesting thing is happening here. We sell pre-built harnesses but nobody buys them. What it amounts to is all those shops-- take a great deal of pride in the way they do this.. They don't want to stuff in any store-bought harness_. Their view is just the opposite: the things they put in are better than those that are put in by manufacturers. Now you go from that kind of shop to a shop which does buy all the stuff because he either doesn't want to fool with it or he doesn't have the capability. There are a lot of owner-installed things too.

MR. MC RUER: Just to be sure we get something from everybody, George Lucchi, would you like to give some comments?

MR. LUCCHI: Yes, we dear of a large proliferation on navigation systems for the future such as OMEGA, inertial, LORAN, RNAV, Doppler, and we hear about SATCOM. I would like to ask NASA if one of the studies they might do is to review all of these systems and establish a minimum system required for navigation for various missions. Unless we address this one, we'll continue to talk about ILS which was developed over 30 years ago.

We're still using it. Are we going to continue using it 5, 10, 15 years from now?

I think that a system study is needed to provide direction to us manufacturers.

On what should we concentrate for the new, most cost effective, mission- oriented avionics of the future.

So we need to know what to inte- grate before we start, DR. SMYTH: Wade Foy. Let's hear from you.

MR. FOY: I would like to advance one of my pet ideas since somebody pointed out the drastic inefficiency of our current communication system. I would like to propose that NASA undertake the study of random access solutions for current communications systems. We have techniques that involve pseudo- random codes, and things like this that can provide random access. There are a number of good theoretical solutions around studied in the military.

I would like to suggest this might be a possible solution to some of the diffi- culties in the communications business.

DR. Any SMYTH: comments to blade's thoughts about random access communications?

QUESTION: Yes, I'd Tike to ask, what is it?

MR. FOY: The basic scheme is that instead of frequency channelized, communication, you provide what I think of as code channelization.

And there're enough codes around so that some digital process that (everybody says doesn't cost anything anymore), can separate the different codes. So you can call an individual airplane if you want to the airplane pilot can call the individual ground station he wants, and there isn't any of this business, "Did he say 118.3 tic, or what?". In effect, it's a fast telephone system only you don't have to dial, you just pick it up and call it.

I'd like to hit on one more point that's troubled MR. MC RUER: me during a good deal of this conference. One gets the impression that many of the things NASA was told to do--are highly negative, and that general aviation avionics should simply continue on the way that it has, waiting for salvation from Detroit, which, one might point out, is in desperate need of self salvation in some ways right now. I find it difficult to believe we should wait for the automotive industry to solve our problems.

I'd like to provoke some kind of a response from those of us involved in aviation on what I sense is almost a senile attitude on our part; that we're going to sit back and wait for somebody else to solve our unique problems, or better yet, to take leader- ship in a field, which is a major part of the aviation business.

MR. GORHAM: You put it better than I did. There's a kind of standing wave in technology and when you starta new airplane, you grab hold of as much as is sensible and run. And if that standing wave is small when you start a new airplane, you're not going to grab it at all. So I think the analogy is: don't let that wave keep moving ahead of us so much that there's a big gap in the middle.

I feel that in general, innovation has typically gone DR. NOYCE: on in areas where there hasn't been any control, and I'm a littie afraid of working in an environment where we're trying to standar- dize, as was pointed out this morning. On the other hand, I'm also very much afraid we'll go off in all directions at once and we won't get enough effort concentrated in one area to get any advances. The point I was trying to make there was simply that you've got to have volume to get cost down, and cost seems to me to be really critical in the general aviation case.

I don't want to be misunderstood in what I'm trying MR. BAIL: to say. There is a role for NASA in the general aviation world.

The role should be in inventing systems that permit architectures that are much less costly. Their role should not be trying to guide the equipment manufacturer in how to make less ;costly boxes that have functions that exist today.' That's the differentiation I would try to make. The role should be (in participation

perhaps

with FAA studies) asking questions:; is OMEGA the way to go 10 years from now? Does it really have the accuracy? There's where I see NASA's role. I don't see the NASA role in giving Bob money to develop the synthesizer, or an OMNI converter, or things of that sort. Don't read it as negative. There is basic research: systems design.

I'd like to draw an analogy to another situation.

MR. SEACORD: The NACA did a tremendous amount of research on control circuits configuration. World War II came along and in spite of all their best efforts, forced the adoption of hydraulic controls. There was no other way to do it (for a lot of other reasons) but they ended (SEACORD Cont) by having hydraulic controls in airplanes. In the immediate post war picture, when they really got into the picture, there was a considerable lack of fundamental knowledge on how to design a hydraulic valve for a fast acting hydraulic servo, as far as generally applicable parametric studies. You could find people who swore you had to have a closed center valve; people who swore you had to have an opened center valve, underlapped or overlapped, and anything else you could think of. There wasn't any data. The military was forced; they went to hydraulic controls, and the various manufacturers blundered through; some of them blundered badly and some of them didn't blunder so badly. The equipment people in the hydraulics industry learned how to do those valves.

It took a long time to get on commercial airplanes, even after it was already demonstrated to be a usable concept in the military.

It was usable, it was expensive, it wasn't too reliable, and it was messy and several other things. It was an economic problem then; it wasn't a technical problem anymore. But there was one other decisive factor: it was the safety factor.

We see the same thing coming now. We talk about the use of flight control to handle critical flight modes in an unstable airplane.

This has been done for some time the military. I don't know in when it'll ever be done commercially unless the government does something to sufficiently establish the reliability of that principle of control, not necessarily a detailed design. The air- craft operators made a comment on a study that NASA had made on the mass transport technology program. Their comments were to be on the use of this advanced technology. They said they would use it if you give us 50,000 operating hours of data that says we can safely fly an airplane that's unstable and maintain it. Until we have data of about that magnitude we will not buy an airplane like that. So, if fly-by-wire or CCV, for example, is going to be used short of 20 years from now, the government is going to somebody in have to put a lot of money into industry. And the same thing goes for all these other things.

I mentioned 'headup display.. I certainly don't know whether any- body could ever build up a headup display that's cheap enough. I ;- also don't _know if that's the right way from the human standpoint.__ I think it is but I certainly don't know that. NASA is the perfect organization to examine first the human factors. They have the simulators and the aircraft, and they can determine if that's a way or good a bad way to land an airplane in whether. I think there is a place for NASA to work in the hardware but not in the realm _detailed design for thefinal product.

DR. DE BRA: What we wanted to do at this point is to give you some flavor of the kind of summary we have in mind. As you see on the program, there's a lofty statement that we're going to do a Final Report preparation this afternoon. I hope you'll read between the lines; what actually will happen is Duane, Dick, Dallas, Mike and I`will get together after lunch here and if any of you have a specific sentence or two that you just really feel ought to be in, we'd love to have you write it down so we can incorporate it.

I'm going to read a couple of hundred words here that summarizes most of what we discussed yesterday, and I'm going to ask Dick to then add a hundred words or so on his Panel this morning. We would like to spend a few minutes here before lunch to get your feedback on the direction in which we're going. This is known as "making as big a target of yourself as possible".

General Aviation is a diverse market with product prices spanning about two orders of magnitude. This causes a wide range of models and types of equipment which keeps total numbers of any product small. However, general aviation has been aggressive in adopting new avionics technology through encouragement from the market field and the FAA--particularly for enhanced safety. The price constraints, low volume, and nature of the aircraft in which the avionics is mounted result in several problem areas. The most frequently men- tioned are; reliability with heat, cost, weight, commonality, interfacing different manufacturers' components, and limits in panel space.

There is promise that with digital processing approaching negligible expense, avionics can overcome some of the problems by appropriate architecture and development. Sensors and displays appear to be the principal problem areas in information handling. Actuators are the needed area in control.

General aviation will have to depend on other large volume indus- p 9 tries for development of basic components The development of inte- grated electronics has been the response to commercial markets.

The electronic market potential of the automobile industry is more than one billion dollars. The watch and calculator industries have been pushing display technology although the cathode ray tube remains the least expensive for a'high resolution, general purpose display. The commercial and military aircraft fields have done all things that are feasible with a few exceptions (e.g., develop meats in fluidics) but the technology is not likely to be within acceptable costs for most of the general aviation aircraft. So, in general, general aviation will continue to depend on commercial main stream technology and shouldn't develop special purpose LSI A significant effect of changing sensor technology is that they can be thought of as another "chip" (e.g., the Si technology pressure transducer). Becoming part of the Si technology develop- ment lead to small size and power, and major improvement in can reliability. If incorporated into the electronics, we may not have to measure each state directly but may find an "attitude component" replacing the D.G., turn and bank, artificial horizon, which filtering will take advantage of the physics of the etc., in aircraft to infer some states from measurements of others. Special areas of interest are displays, heat pipes, and gyros.

NASA could contribute (1) in developing algorithms (2) ideas on architecture (3) establishing system requirements (4) establishing effective test methods provide seed money for certain types of sensors, but, in (5) general (6) should not become involved in the development of hardware.

DR.. SMYTH: Just going through my notes from the Panel this morning. Al- ready the pressures of free enterprise have produced products using some of the advanced technology we've been talking about.

A number of our panel members shared their experiences in devel- oping sophisticated systems for commercial aircraft from which we can distill some messages.

(1) Improving navigation capability seems to be a common consensus.

(2) Reducing the pilot workload was a key element thatcame out of the discussions.

Requirements for good status information on the whole (3) situation--not only navigation, but fuel, and range to go, etc.

(4) There were some disagreements and controversy regarding software development and whether it should or should not be sponsored by NASA. I think that's still a good ques- tion open for discussion.

(5) It was pointed out that the use of such things as data 4 busses in the avionic system can give single point failure modes which would wipe out everything.

(6) I thought Buster Seacord did a nice job of summarizing some of the new functions we need, and how 'these vary with the complexity of the aircraft. He noted a require- ment for flight management, for flat surface displays, CRTs, and RNAV, even for the lower category aircraft.

He also cited the need for microwave landing systems, which may reflect his recent assignments in that area (SMYTH Cont) (7) Woven through all these comments were the beneficial aspects of functional redundancy, and I think that any- body configuring a system right now would retain functional redundancy in any systems architectures they'd come up with.

(8) I thought John Bail had some very good points--one of which was the allowance of evolutionary change. We may need revolutions in certain areas, but not overall.

The question of what new functions we really need must (9) be addressed. There are some areas that could be improved.

(10) Navigation status information which is clear and easy to understand is vital.

(11) Fuel and range reserves that can be presented in a clear, unambiguous fashion is necessary. I think one of the kinds of problems the general aviation pilot has that the air- line pilot doesn't have as much is that he does have limited range. He's also operating at a speed regime where wind can have a large impact on range. If he could have some aids to tell him whether he could overfly the intended fuel spot and go a bit further, or whether he's going to have to land sooner, he could perhaps save an hour or so on a 4 or 5 hour flight, and also do it safer.

These are some of the functions and problems that pilots in general aviation don't have right now.

DR. DE BRA: Again, please let us know what you think has been omitted

or what you'd like to see included. We'd be even happier if you'd

jot down a sentence right now and leave it with us.

COMMENT: I'm just a little concerned. I know there's a lot of people

here who make autopilots, and I hear a lot about the possibilities of taking the workload off the pilot by letting the airplane fly itself. I'd feel a little uncomfortable with that, maybe because I learned to fly 20 years ago. It seems to me that maybe we ought

to think more seriously about the problem of relieving the pilot

of his workload by minimizing the communications rigmarole that he goes through; e.g., minimize the problems of monitoring that he

has to do, and let

him devote more of his time to literally being

pilot in command and flying the airplane. When worse comes to

worst, functional redundancy that leaves the pilot in command

me

seems to to be the best solution. And I would just like to throw that out as a general philosophical consideration to what

extent do we

want to leave the pilot, the final link, in control

of the airplane, and is it reasonable to talk about reducing work-

load by simply taking away from him the command of his airplane?

DR. SMYTH: I would say the biggest problem in control for the general aviation aircraft is directional control. You look away from the flight instruments for 30 seconds and you change heading by 30 deg.

To me, that's a problem.

DR. NOYCE: The reason we're most often turning away from the instru- ment panel is to tune the radios or to look at a chart. So if you could get that out of the way, you could leave the pilot flying the airplane.

DR. SMYTH: The kinds of systems we're talking about would certainly alleviate that problem.

DR. NOYCE: One thought that came up while we were talking about the dual RNAV of the Boeing airplane was, were the total number of bits in that machine on the order of a megabit or a megabyte?

REPLY: That was only the data storage.

DR. NOYCE: Yes, but I would just like to point out that that's about one flex disk, so that you could put your entire airways manual on one flex disk. That means that you can save weight because you can leave 20 lbs of equipment at home.

MR SEACORD: Concerning airplane flying problems, I don't think there's any attempt to take the control away from the pilot, but rather to make the airplane easier to control, MR. L000HI What are the possibilities of having completely "eyes off" control of the airplane, all the instruments, all of the functions, and having the capability of merely reaching over there and feel something, and touch it? Choose the right heading without having to look at the instrument, only looking outside knowing you've got the right lever; knowing you've done the right thing without haying to look at it.

MR. GORHAM Work has been done in this area. The L-1011 and the 747 had a lot of attention paid to shapes. You couldn't inadvertently go to one close to it; it would be squares vs round.

MR. HOLLAAR: We shouldn't accept as an article of faith that automation of communications will make it simpler or take any less of the pilot's time. You can talk to just about any air traffic controller; in a center who's just gone through automation and now doesn't have to work those ugly flight strips and plastic board, but has alphanumeric readout and ask him what he feels it did to his time.

By and large, he'll tell you it's more cumbersome for him nowthan it was before. Flight strips seemed easier for him. Maybe it's a training problem; maybe it's that he hasn's completely accepted this new type of device.

DR. D E BRA: Any other comments? I suggest we continue those comments at lunch but before we break, Dallas and I would both like to thank you very much for all your help and participation.

DR. DE NERY: Yes, I want to say a few words before you leave. First of all, I want to thank everybody for coming. I know you all have very heavy schedule and I really appreciate your participation.

I want to reemphasize the intent of the Workshop. When I gave the opening comments during the Program Overview, I indicated that the General Aviation-Advanced Avionics Systems Program was princi- pally looking at two things: (1) Ways for improving the functional ca p ability, such as improved'NAV algorithms, flight control'systems, and ways of reducing a pilot's workload; (_2) The other is how to implement these ideas in avionics hardware, the emphasis being on the utilization of new technology and systems integration.

It was towards the latter that this Workshop has really been directed.

Based on what I've heard, the consensus is that NASA should support basic research in these areas, but should exercise extreme caution so that it doesn't get into near-term product development. We share your concern and recognize the possibility of falling into the trap of product development unless we are careful and work closely with industry. The purpose of the Workshop is to assist us in defining areas where NASA could provide meaningful research.

Therefore, I would like to ask that you not consider the Workshop as ending now. If you have any thoughts as to where NASA should be concentrating its research effort--what that level of far-out- ness is so that it's not ridiculous, but is also not product devel- opement, I'd appreciate your comments, either on the phone or what- ever. finally, again, I'd like to say "thank you" DR. TASHKER I, too, would like to thank you all. We hope to have the proceedings of this Workshop back to you soon.

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