WingMAN Program – Enhancing Navy Pilot Safety Through Spatial Disorientation Training

Intro

Accelint is advancing Navy pilot safety with the WingMAN program, an SBIR initiative funded by the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (NAWCTSD). The project addresses spatial disorientation (SD), a leading cause of aviation incidents that is estimated to be a significant factor in five to ten percent of all aviation incidents and is the single most common factor in human-error accidents.

Challenge

Spatial disorientation is estimated to be a significant factor in five to ten percent of all aviation incidents and is the single most common factor in human-error accidents, with statistics showing over ninety percent of all SD incidents are fatal. The Navy needed a training system that would help aviators learn to identify, mitigate, and recover from spatial disorientation conditions while enabling instructors to recreate critical flight events to understand how and why they happened.

Solution

WingMAN provides a playback system that allows instructors to quickly recreate flight events virtually on a monitor from multiple perspectives. The system enables instructors, students, and naval aviation stakeholders to watch flight events unfold as though watching them recreated in a movie. Key capabilities include:

• Virtual recreation of flight events from multiple perspectives for analysis and instruction

• Rapid scenario recreation allowing instructors to quickly recreate all types of flight events, including mishaps

• Playback visualization enabling stakeholders to observe how critical events unfolded

• Support for understanding how and why events happened to help avoid mishaps in the future

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WingMAN allows pilots to observe spatial disorientation scenarios and understand the factors contributing to SD, supporting the Navy's training objectives for identifying, mitigating, and recovering from dangerous flight conditions.

Program Impact

Funded through the SBIR program, WingMAN supports NAWCTSD's mission to provide virtual training systems that help naval aviators manage difficult flight conditions. According to Captain Tim Hill, Commanding Officer of NAWCTSD: "Spatial disorientation is an exceptionally dangerous condition for aviators. In naval aviation, pilots are expected to fly in difficult conditions, which is why we invest so much in virtual training systems to help our aviators learn to identify, mitigate, and, if needed, recover from dangerous conditions such as spatial disorientation."