Abstract: An environmental fog/rain visual display system for aircraft simulators comprising a combination of electronic and mechanical integrated elements which operate together to produce realistic environmental conditions that would actually be encountered by a pilot flying an aircraft. The electronic elements of the system include a real time digital computer, a calligraphic color display which simulates landing lights of selective intensity, and a color television camera for producing a moving color display of the airport runway as depicted on a model terrain board. The mechanical simulation elements of the system include an environmental chamber which can produce natural fog, nonhomogeneous fog, rain and fog combined, or rain only. The environmental chamber is positioned between the color scene produced by the television camera and calligraphic color display and the windscreen of the teaching aircraft cockpit.

Abstract: A landing approach lighting system which corrects for the effects of chromatic aberration of the human eye to help prevent a pilot from making misjudgments leading to landings short of a runway threshold.The system utilizes red warning lights to delineate the runway approach with additional blue lights juxtaposed with the red lights such that the red lights are chromatically balanced. The red/blue point light sources result in the phenomenon that the red lights appear in front of the blue lights with about one and one-half times the diameter of the blue. To a pilot observing these lights along a glide path, those red lights directly below appear to be nearer than the blue lights. For those lights farther away seen in perspective at oblique angles, the red lights appear to be in a position closer to the pilot and hence appear to be above the corresponding blue lights.

Abstract: A display for an aircraft simulator that produces an image of an air strip or the like that is accurate in color and in relative light intensity. A television camera supported over a terrain model that simulates an aircraft landing zone, a full spectrum color monitor connected to the camera and lens system for projecting the monitor image onto a lens or screen visually accessible to a trainee in the simulator. The camera is supported on a gantry frame and is movable in six degrees of freedom. There is a control yoke and like simulated aircraft controls accessible to the trainee the outputs of which are linked to the gantry frame. A monochromatic calligraphic display, a digital computer for producing a pattern on the display that corresponds to the lights associated with the landing strip on the terrain model and an optical system for projecting the calligraphic image onto the same lens so that it is superposed on the video representation on the landing field.

Abstract: An aircraft simulator for affording practice in landing maneuvers and the like. A cathode ray tube (CRT) produces an image corresponding to the runway which image changes in response to the trainee's manipulation of controls. The CRT image is projected along an optical path to a screen that is visually accessible to the trainee. Interposed in the optical path are optical elements such as mirrors which are spaced from one another along the optical path so as to create virtual images on the screen that appear to be at different distances from the trainee. The optical elements are sequentially interposed in the path and circuits are provided for synchronizing the production of the CRT image with one of the optical elements so that the image on the screen appears to the trainee to have a range corresponding to the environment being simulated by the CRT image.