Abstract: The present invention is directed to a system and method for a safe flight display through increasing situation awareness by an optimal presentation, given limited capacity of the system. The system may determine which terrain area needs a detail representation and which area needs a coarse representation. A view-dependent visual error metric may be utilized to define and maintain an error bound and accurately minimize the amount of terrain data being depicted. By performing a breadth-first search on the terrain database, a user can determine amount of geometry to be displayed with limited bandwidth of data presentation. The user may be allowed to scale the application to his/her desired level of detail, given a capacity of the system. Therefore, the system may provide a safe flight display with an anticipated and graceful (all portions of the screen would be given an equal quality representation) degradation in performance upon the choice of the user.