Design and Assessment of Fighter Pilot Assistance Systems for Air-to-Air Refuelling with Probe-to-Drogue-Equipment

Abstract

Air-to-air refuelling with a probe-and-drogue system is a highly demanding process for pilots of fighter jets. In the frame of the project F(AI)²R (Future Air-to-Air Refuelling) DLR is designing concepts for assistance and automation systems to support fighter pilots during air-to-air refuelling. The AAR-process was examined with a hierarchical task analysis (HTA) based on literature review and semi-structured interviews with four test pilots of the Bundeswehr Technical Center for Aircraft and Aeronautical Equipment (WTD 61), six Tornado pilots and ten Eurofighter pilots of the German Airforce. Furthermore, the so called "Situation Awareness Requirements", which represent relevant parameters for the situation awareness (SA) of the fighter pilot, were derived from the HTA and rated by pilots according to their relevance during each phase of the air-to-air refuelling process. The collected data were used to design different concepts of pilot assistance systems using a morphological box and a decision matrix. The different pilot assistance system concepts were visualised as storyboards. These storyboards were then assessed by test pilots of WTD 61 and optimized with their feedback. In this paper, the used methodology as well as first results of the task analysis and situation awareness requirements analysis are presented. Besides that, a concept storyboard for a pilot assistance system displaying the overtake speed for establishing contact is described. As an outlook the planned implementation of pilot assistance systems using the HoloLens 2 is explained and the planning for the subsequent simulator study on the DLR fighter aircraft simulator MARS-FIT is described