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Adverse Weather Landing System (AWLS)

Aviation accidents of aircraft in poor visibility are a serious problem, and have cost lost of life and considerable loss of military and commercial equipment. The ability to eliminate poor visibility due to rain, fog, sand storms, and snow storms using electro optic and signal processing techniques could save lives and loss of aviation equipment. The Adverse Weather Landing System (AWLS) program will provide military pilots with an enhanced visual situational awareness capability to assist in making landing approaches in adverse weather and low visibility conditions.

The program will collect limited visibility data from a variety of sources including static field measurements of runway landing lights, and brown out data at test ranges. Data will also be collected using dynamic flight tests of existing sensors. The imaging system will be used to characterize the landing approach lights, runway lights and terrain features during visible, adverse weather, and brown-out conditions. Images in the visible, short, mid and long wave infrared will be collected. The data collected will be analyzed to develop requirements for a high resolution landing camera system. AWLS instrumentation will be upgraded with an improved calibration system to reduce pattern noise in the infrared (IR) sensors. The current low-visibility enhancement algorithms will be evaluated to enhance visibility. The signal processing task will enhance imagery using algorithms developed for the AWLS program to determine the best algorithm/band, and recommend an approach to enhance visual information to aid the pilot in aircraft landing in low visibility.