Abstract
A flight capability to take a terrain following flight near the ground is required to reduce the probability that a fighter aircraft can be detected by foe's radar fence in the battlefield. The success rate for mission flight has increased by adopting TFS (Terrain Following System) to enable the modern advanced fighter to fly safely near the ground at the low altitude. This system has applied to the state-of-the-art fighter and bomber, such as B-1, F-111, F-16 E/F and F-15, since the research begins from 1960's. In this paper, the terrain following system and GCAS (Ground Collision Avoidance System) was developed, based on a digital database with UTAS's TERPRROM (TERrain PROfile Matching) equipment. This system calculates the relative location of the aircraft in the terrain database by using the aircraft status information provided by the radar altimeter and the INS (Inertial Navigation System), based on the digital terrain database loaded previously in the DTC (Data Transfer Cartridge), and figures out terrain features around. And, the system is a manual terrain following system which makes a steering command cue refer to flight path marker, on the HUD (Head Up Display), for vertical acceleration essential for terrain following flight and enables a pilot to follow it. The cue is based on the recognized terrain features and TCH (Target Clearance Height) set by a pilot in advance. The developed terrain following system was verified in the real-time pilot evaluation in FA-50 HQS (Handling Quality Simulator) environment.
