Flight deck interval management and delegated separation for equivalent visual operations
An emerging Next Generation Air Transportation System concept — Equivalent Visual Operations (EVO) — can be achieved using an electronic means to provide sufficient visibility of the external world and other required flight references on flight deck displays that enable the safety, operational tempos, and visual flight rules (VFR)-like procedures for all weather conditions. Synthetic and enhanced flight vision system technologies are critical enabling technologies to EVO. Current research evaluated concepts for flight deck-based interval management (FIM) operations, integrated with Synthetic Vision and Enhanced Vision flight-deck displays and technologies. One concept involves delegated flight deck-based separation, in which the flight crews were paired with another aircraft and responsible for spacing and maintaining separation from the paired aircraft, termed, “equivalent visual separation.” The operation required the flight crews to acquire and maintain an “equivalent visual contact” as well as to conduct manual landings in low-visibility conditions. The paper describes results that evaluated the concept of EVO delegated separation, including an off-nominal scenario in which the lead aircraft was not able to conform to the assigned spacing resulting in a loss of separation.
A simulation environment for evaluation of Integrated Alerting and Notification (IAN) concepts
In order to pursue solutions that simultaneously increase the flight crew's ability to avoid, detect, and recover from unexpected events while also providing countermeasures to pilot error, an onboard Hazard and Integrity Monitor (HIM) function as well as an Integrated Alerting and Notification (IAN) function have previously been proposed to detect and assess hazards, and issue integrated and prioritized alerts and notifications to the flight crew. The objective of these functions is to mitigate hazards introduced by the operators, the application of automation, and the environment. This paper presents a simulation environment developed for verification and validation of the HIM and IAN concepts. This simulation environment models aircraft communication, navigation, surveillance, and health reporting systems and sensors, along with their respective error models. The environment allows for test and evaluation of HIM and IAN concepts under varying sensor and data link configurations and can easily be interface with human-in-the-loop simulators as well. Because of its flexibility of the onboard avionics configurations, this simulation environment can also be used to test other new avionics sensors and algorithms. This paper will discuss the functionality of this simulation environment including avionics properties, data structures, interfaces, and operational modes. Finally, this paper will describe an experiment being prepared on the Research Flight Deck (RFD) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center (LaRC) that will use this simulation environment in a human-in-the-loop study.
Phytochemical and FT-IR Spectral Analysis of Certain Bamboo Species of SouthIndia
Bamboo with its varied uses has historically been an integral part of livelihoods and lifestyles in India. The present study was carried out to characterize the bioactive constituents present in the leaf extracts of certain bamboo species using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic analysis (FT-IR). The various solvent extracts of various bamboo leaves subjected to qualitative analysis showed the availability of phytoconstituents including alkaloids, phenolic compounds, flavonoids, saponins, glycosides, terpenoids, steroids, coumarins and phytosterols. Quinones were completely absent in all the five bamboo species. The FT-IR spectrum confirmed the presence of sulphides (SS), phenols (C-O), aromatic compounds, thiols (S-H), aliphatic compounds (C-Cl) and amines (NH) in different bamboo species. The present investigation has also opened avenues for further research into the development of potent phytomedicines from different bamboo species.