Accident Rates in Glass Cockpit Model U.S. Army Rotary-Wing Aircraft
Abstract
Following the lead set by commercial aviation, the U.S. Army has developed and fielded crewstation designs for four aircraft types that replace traditional instruments with multifunction displays (MFDs). These MFD-based crewstations are known as "glass cockpits". In addition, the U.S. Army fields two aircraft models using a hybrid design which has a mix of dedicated instruments and MFDs. The U.S. Army Safety Center accident database was investigated to compare accident rates for the traditional and glass cockpit models for the OH-58 Kiowa, the UH-60 Black Hawk, CH-47 Chinook, and AH-64 Apache. The accident rates were combined across classes and calculated for the overlapping years for which both the traditional and glass cockpit models were flown. For the OH-58, the glass cockpit accident rate of 20.30 (expressed in accidents per 100,000 flight hours) exceeded the 4.37 rate of the traditional cockpit. For the UH-60, the glass cockpit accident rate of 17.06 exceeded the 8.81 rate of the traditional cockpit. For the CH-47, the 3.94 accident rate of the glass cockpit was less than the 6.97 rate of the traditional cockpit. For the AH-64, the glass cockpit accident rate of 23.00 exceeded the 18.36 rate of the traditional cockpit.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2001
- Accession Number
- ADA394788
Entities
People
- C. Rash
- C. Suggs
- G. Adam
- P. Leduc
- S. Manning
Organizations
- United States Army Aeromedical Research Lab