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As air traffic is increasing, the probability of encountering 'surveillance' alerts during flight is also increasing. In order to ensure safety, new on board systems need to be developed to provide the crew with a better 'situation awareness' (SA) about its external environment and potential hazards. In addition, the means to manage the data generated by these new systems needs to be build up. Despite the tremendous amount of information, crew workload must not increase. This is where the ISAWARE project comes in with the Integrated Situation Awareness System (ISAS) concept. ISAWARE (Increasing Safety through collision Avoidance WARning intEgration) is a project partly funded by the European Community, executed by a well balanced composition of several European aerospace companies (airframers, a helicopter manufacturer, avionics suppliers, airlines), one research laboratory and one university. The overall objective of the ISAWARE project is to conduct research into the potential improvements to flight safety that can be achieved by providing the pilot with complete predictive situation awareness during all phases of the flight. The Integrated Situational Awareness System (ISAS) merges data from different safety systems concerning terrain, traffic, weather and other. The system ensures the alerts consistency, prioritises alerts and anticipates threats along a predicted trajectory earlier than current systems can provide. The second main axis of the research is the development of synthetic vision displays (PFD, ND and HUD) to enhance the Human-Machine Interface (HMI). The key focus of the project is the development of a ground-based demonstrator rig which is interfaced to a dynamic flight simulator. This rig is used for the evaluation of the ISAWARE concept by a representative range of active airline crews.
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