Flight Testing Quadeye The First Night Vision Helmet Mounted Cueing System for Fixed Wing Jet Aircraft

In 2002 the United States Navy introduced helmet mounted cueing systems (HMCS) into tactical jet operations. As aircrews have become more reliant on their HMCS the requirement for a night vision capable cueing system has risen to the forefront of HMCS technology. One proposed solution to this requirement was Quadeye. Quadeye is a wide-angle (100deg field of view) four cathode-ray tube system with injected Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing video. The Navy flew 8 evaluation sorties from March to August 2005, in the F-18 A-F fighter aircraft. The goal of this limited scope effort was to answer four questions:

1. 
   

   Does the basic display function as designed?

2. Does the wide-angle night vision provide a usable 100deg field of view?

3. Are the two main capabilities that the Quadeye system enables, night vision helmet mounted display and wide field of view, useful in the operational environment?

4. Are design changes required in order to field the system? If so, what are they?

During the course of executing the Quadeye test plan; the team demonstrated that Night Vision Helmet Mounted Cueing Systems improved both the lethality (time to destroy the target) and survivability (likelihood of surviving the mission) of the F-18 by by more than a factor of two. The team also discovered several design deficiencies in the Quadeye system that must be corrected prior to fielding the final production version. During the test execution several new lessons were learned. These lessons should be used in the testing of future night vision helmet mounted cueing systems.