Abstract:
To maintain offshore wind farms, helicopters are often used for the transportation of maintenance personnel and equipment. Offshore missions present numerous challenges for pilots and crew, due to environmental factors (e.g. lack of visual cues over the sea surface) and weather conditions (e.g. fog and low clouds). In order to enhance safety and operational capability of helicopters, a pilot assistance system especially developed for offshore operations has been investigated within the project HeliPAS-OW. The multimodal pilot assistance system consisting of a head-up visual display system, sensor-based system for obstacle detection, specific offshore route planning and a navigation system have been tested. Results from an initial test campaign conducted using the research flight simulator, the Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES), are presented. This was accomplished as collaboration between the project partners from industry and research. The evaluation of the results focuses on the impact on workload and situational awareness, as well as the possibilities for optimizing the system. The results show that the pilot assistance can improve the situational awareness and reduce the workload in a degraded environment.