Landing an aircraft is one of the most challenging tasks a pilot undertakes. During the landing process, the aircraft is transitioned from operating in three dimensions of motion to operating in two dimensions of motion, and brought to a stop. To perform the landing properly, the aircraft approaches the runway within certain attitude, course, speed, and rate of descent limits. The course limits include, for example, both lateral limits and glide slope limits. An approach outside of these limits can result in the aircraft landing short of the runway, overrunning the runway, or otherwise contacting the runway surface in an uncontrolled manner. Any one of these events is undesirable.
In some instances visibility may be poor during approach and landing operations, resulting in what is known as instrument flight conditions. During instrument flight conditions, pilots rely on instruments, rather than visibility, to navigate the aircraft. Many airports and aircraft include instrument landing systems (ILS) to help guide aircraft during approach and landing operations. These systems allow for the display of a lateral deviation indicator to indicate aircraft lateral deviation from the approach course, and the display of a glide slope indicator to indicate vertical deviation from the glide slope.
The glide slope indicator is typically displayed on an aircraft primary flight display. Although the manner in which the glide slope indicator is displayed may vary, more recent glide slope indicators are configured to display a dot, or other geometric symbol, on one side of the primary flight display. The geometric symbol may be displayed relative to another geometric symbol or set of symbols, to indicate whether the aircraft is above, below, or on the desired glide slope.
Although present glide slope indicators, including those described immediately above, are generally safe, reliable, and robust, these glide slope indicators do suffer certain drawbacks. For example, these glide slope indicators are displayed in a manner that may not intuitively depict the current aircraft glide slope deviation to the pilot. As a result, the pilot may not correctly maneuver the aircraft, at least initially, to reduce the glide slope deviation.
Hence, there is a need for a system and method of displaying aircraft glide slope to an aircraft flight crew that is more intuitive than presently used indicators. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.