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.
Accident Rates in Glass Cockpit Model U.S. Army Rotary-Wing Aircraft
2001
61 pages
Report
No indication
English
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