Register
Avionics

Synthetic Vision: VistaNav Rule

The glass panel revolution hasnt happened yet. The big leap is to synthetic vision, where blue over orange is replaced with a topographic terrain in 3D perspective and navigation is by some kind of highway-in-the-sky (HITS) guidance. The only company to make this leap in a certified system so far is Chelton. For the 99 percent of us who cant invest $100,000 in a full-panel overhaul, however, there are some portable options for under $5000.

Jeff VanWest
Verified

Th

e glass panel revolution hasnt happened yet. The big leap is to synthetic vision, where blue over orange is replaced with a topographic terrain in 3D perspective and navigation is by some kind of highway-in-the-sky (HITS) guidance. The only company to make this leap in a certified system so far is Chelton. For the 99 percent of us who cant invest $100,000 in a full-panel overhaul, however, there are some portable options for under $5000.

They require their own display-a laptop computer or EFB-type tablet-plus hardware that will tell the aircraft not only where it is in space, but also its bank angle, pitch and velocity. Systems that rely entirely on GPS information can intuit much of this, but they don’t know if an aircraft is right-side up. Theyd happily

Chuck Burkhead

draw the world as level even if the aircraft was halfway through a snap roll.

If we limit the discussion to portable systems that have some type of attitude gyro driving their 3D display, only two primary competitors remain: VistaNav from Mercury Computing Systems and MountainScope from PCAvionics. Soon, Flight Cheetah from Echoflight will combine their attitude information with their 3D display, but as we go to press with this report, that software is still in beta.

The View from A Vista

“What I often tell people when theyre first getting started is to not even load anything,” says Jeff Simon, product manager for VistaNav. “Just fly with it in synthetic-vision view so you get that VFR view out the window.” Enhanced situational awareness is the number-one plus of synthetic vision. You might see nothing but grey mist or the black of night on an approach to an airport, but on the little screen you see a runway, hillsides and obstructions, all in three dimensions. Turn on the terrain warning (TAWS) feature and terrain safely below you is colored green, the dirt and rocks within 1000 feet of your wheels is yellow and stuff higher than you is red. Thats based on your current altitude, but a forward-looking TAWS that would predict a conflict is in the works.

In the 3D view, airports, NAVAIDs and intersections appear as flags in the virtual sky pointing down to the ground. Its intuitive, but can get cluttered. VistaNav has extensive configuration options to turn on and off what you see and when you see it. A whole set of options can be saved as one of four views. A set of onscreen buttons running down the left of the display lets you quickly toggle what you need to see for different circumstances. There’s also a 2D view, which is a standard moving map display. The display most users fly with in the real world is a split-screen with 3D on top and the moving map on the bottom. We found the interface straightforward and intuitive. Tap an airport in either view and you get a popup with airport information (including weather if you have the optional XM

Jeff VanWest