DOW-UAP-D144: Cockpits in the Era of Breakthrough Flight - Six Degrees of Freedom, a Double Hull and a Virtual Surround Display

Source file: DOW-UAP-D144_AAWSAP-DIRD-Cockpits-in-the-Era-of-Breakthrough-Flight-November-1-2010.pdf Originating agency: Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Technology Warning Division (DWO-4), Defense Warning Office, under the AAWSAP program Document type: Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), "Defense Futures" series; control number DIA-08-1011-002 Date: 1 November 2010 (information cutoff date, ICOD: 8 July 2010) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (the FOUO caveat is struck through on the released copy; made public in 2026) Page count: 57 VIRIN: 260918-D-D0360-1133 PURSUE Release: 6

Summary

This is one of the 37 AAWSAP (Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program) DIRDs released in PURSUE 6, and it is an outlier in the series: it is not about an engine, a material or an energy source, but about the person sitting inside the vehicle. According to its introduction, the study responds to a request to explore forefront science relevant to future cockpits for "any form of aerospace craft and/or deep-space craft that is propelled by any unspecified advanced or breakthrough propulsion physics." In other words, the author assumes the physics has already been cracked and asks what the pilot would need to see and operate.

The paper has four chapters and two appendices. Chapter 1 derives the implications of propulsion breakthroughs for the vehicle and its cockpit (pages 6 to 22). Chapter 2 summarizes established human-machine interface lessons (pages 23 to 36). Chapter 3 presents a "provisional cockpit" for breakthrough flight (pages 37 to 47), and Chapter 4 lists next steps (pages 48 and 49). Appendix A is an annotated bibliography and Appendix B a set of endnotes. There are 14 figures and one table.

The author is identified only by the pseudonym AAP Person 82, and comments are directed to the AAWSA Program Manager, who appears as AAP Person 1. The author stresses that all projections are based on public-domain information and should be read as conjecture. The paper does not mention UFOs, UAP or any observed object; the vehicle it discusses is entirely hypothetical.

Research Article

Where the predictions come from, and their limits

The author's main source is the book Frontiers of Propulsion Science (AIAA, 2009), particularly its chapters 3, 4 and 15. The paper describes it as a book that "may be the first-ever scholarly compilation of science pertaining to breakthrough flight." The method is stated plainly: design for ideal, maximally demanding performance, because that is where the strictest design requirements come from.

The assumptions are explicit. The craft is propelled by interacting with the properties of space-time or the inertial frames around it, and can accelerate at g levels beyond human endurance. Its interior can be held anywhere between 0 and 1 g regardless of its motion. Faster-than-light speeds are possible, but because of energy requirements and the human lifespan the study assumes practical star flight will be limited to a 100-light-year radius around the Sun, a range that, it notes, still contains thousands of star systems. The energy supply is carried on board.

Alongside the assumptions sits a section titled "Sanity Check on Predictions," in which the author qualifies the paper's own claims: these are "informed conjectures," not yet published or debated with other scientists and engineers. The study also deliberately excludes brain implants and transhumanism (re-engineering humans), so that the cockpit is adapted to people rather than people to the cockpit.

A small administrative point is worth noting: the standard note on page 2 says the product is one of a series of reports "produced in FY 2009," although the cover date is November 2010. This appears to be series boilerplate rather than a dating of this particular paper.

The double hull: when the pilot cannot feel the motion

The first implication is full six-degree-of-freedom motion. An airplane moves mostly as deviations from forward flight, and a helicopter is governed by its rotor dynamics; a breakthrough vehicle should be able to hover, change orientation (yaw, pitch, roll) without losing altitude, and move up, down or sideways without tilting. That means independent control inputs for all six axes and new displays for position, orientation and motion. Figure 1 illustrates this with a craft that, per its caption, is a hypothetical composite of three 1960s science-fiction vehicles: the Seaview submarine, the Galileo shuttle and the Amtronic car.

The second implication, and in the author's words the most perplexing, is a mismatch between what the body feels and what the vehicle does. Figure 3 proposes concentric zones: the crew cabin at the center, an "inner hull" that maintains a safe environment, and an "outer hull" containing the propulsion. The author offers two examples of why such a double hull would be needed. The first is the Alcubierre warp drive, based on the geometry of Einstein's general relativity: space-time expands behind the craft and contracts ahead of it, and the craft inside the "warp bubble" feels no acceleration (Figure 4, the "York Extrinsic Time Plot"). The paper does not go into feasibility; in mainstream physics such a solution is known to require negative energy density, which has not been demonstrated at macroscopic scale.

The second example is a "Bias Drive," a kind of "field drive" in which the scalar potential defining an inertial frame is modified so that its gradient acts on matter like a gravitational field (Figures 5 and 6). In the author's version, if the outer hull creates a 10-g field, the inner hull compensates so that the crew cabin is free of it, and could even create 1 g while the craft coasts in empty space. The author cautions that these are "thought experiments" and that the physics is still at steps one and two of the scientific method: defining the problem and collecting data. Momentum conservation, the role of inertial frames and ways of affecting the gravitational and inertial properties of matter are named as open problems.

The cost to the pilot: loss of the "seat-of-pants" feel, a risk of motion sickness from the mismatch between visual and vestibular cues, and probably no direct view of the outside. The conclusion is put bluntly: "do not expect windows." As mitigation, the author suggests letting a portion of the vehicle's g-loading through to the cockpit, which in turn requires a dedicated control.

Flight regimes, speeds and navigation without an "up"

Such a craft would go directly from the ground into space, so its displays must cover near-surface flight, orbit insertion and long cruising in zero g. Humans have no instinct for orbits: a person can run to catch a thrown ball, but not place a vehicle in orbit, so displays must present the relation between orbital altitude and orbital speed. In deep space there is no "up" and no sense of motion: relativistic distortions above 1% appear only beyond 10% of light speed, so even at 60 million miles per hour (9% c) the view outside will look stationary. The author observes that science-fiction spacecraft move "forward" at right angles to their internal 1 g (Figure 7), whereas in a rocket the thrust and the g-axis coincide, and calls the choice a subject for a trade study: "Once any convention is set into place, it will be difficult to change later."

Table 1 is perhaps the most striking set of numbers in the paper: the distance covered in one second, the time it takes a pilot to scan a display and react, before any corrective action begins. Walking (2 mph), it is 3 feet; hypersonic flight (4,000 mph), 5,900 feet; low Earth orbit (17,500 mph), 5 miles; a deep-space probe (35,000 mph), 10 miles; at 9% of light speed, 17,000 miles; at light speed, 190 thousand miles; and at 20 times light speed, in a row whose label ends in a question mark, 4 million miles. The footnote points to a three-order-of-magnitude gap between the fastest probe achieved and the "nonrelativistic flight" row, calling it "a clear statement about the state of our technology." Hence the conclusion that automated flight control must take precedence over manual control.

The navigation section adds the relativistic twin paradox, which means the clock mismatch between crew and base must be displayed, and the argument that during faster-than-light travel Doppler shifts would cut off light from ahead and behind ("Again, do not count on windows"). Inertial navigation becomes harder when inertial forces inside the craft differ from those outside. As a substitute the paper proposes a "universal speedometer": the cosmic microwave background (CMB), against which Earth's velocity has been measured at 365 km/s, more than 1.3 million km/h (Figure 8), though it would not be detectable at FTL speeds. Star trackers would work only at sublight speed, and for FTL flight they would have to predict where stars will be at the time of arrival, because the light we see is old: "Alpha Centauri's condition will be a surprise upon arrival."

Human-machine lessons that do not change

Chapter 2 is the most conventional and best-sourced part of the paper, drawing, according to its endnotes, on aviation and NASA human-factors literature. The figures are specific: no more than about 4 to 12 colors at once, with the red-yellow-green triad for danger, caution and safe; red-green or blue-yellow colorblindness in 8% of males and 0.4% of females. The full field of view extends ±100° laterally, about 60° up and 75° down; the easily scanned zone is roughly ±60°, the detail zone ±6°, and the reading zone only ±2°, which "corresponds to only one square inch at a distance of 2 feet." The eye tends to fixate on the upper-right corner of a display.

Response times: 0.4 to 0.6 seconds to extract a value from a display, 0.125 to 0.2 seconds for a recheck and another 0.125 to 0.2 seconds to act, 0.7 to 1.0 seconds in total, so displays should not update faster than roughly half a second. Stress produces "tunnel vision," so critical information belongs in the center. Short-term memory holds 3 to 10 items, so menus should offer 4 to 7 choices. The author describes the "keyhole" error, when a user gets lost in a layered display system, and the "mode error," such as entering a heading for an autopilot that is not engaged. The paper cites a 1989 survey in which over half of Boeing 757 and 767 pilots felt automation had actually increased their workload.

The recurring conclusion: critical displays and controls must be physical and fixed in place. Gesture, voice commands (with the system repeating each command back for confirmation) and non-invasive brain-machine interfaces are accepted as augmentations, not substitutes; of the last, the paper writes that "a weak link in these systems is the human mind itself; that is, thoughts can wander." The chapter closes with a comparison to the Airbus A380 flight deck and a modern primary flight display (PFD), and with a 1959 book's rendering of a "space travel control station," offered, the caption says, to convey the provisional nature of far-future speculation, including this report's own.

The provisional cockpit

Chapter 3 designs for the hardest case: a single pilot. Figure 13 shows a seat inside a sphere, the "virtual surround display" onto which exterior camera images are projected, with a minimal set of physical panels in front of the seat. Four flight modes are defined: full manual; manual with safe assist, in which the system intervenes to prevent collisions or entry into hazardous zones such as dangerous radiation or gravitational fields too strong to escape; interactive assist, in which the pilot issues "drive to" commands; and fully autonomous, which carries on with the last command even if the pilot is incapacitated.

Figure 14 maps the panels. At the center, in the "tunnel vision" zone, is the "vector motion display," the successor to the PFD for six degrees of freedom and three flight regimes; to its left the navigation display and to its right the "flight assist" panel, similar to an airliner's flight management system, which will automatically select its top recommendation if the pilot does not respond in time. The survival enunciator is split into external, vehicle and cabin alarms, each limited to 4 to 10. The emergency response panel has six buttons: evasive collision avoidance, escape to safe loiter position, get medical assistance, effect automated repair, return to base, and flight-assist recommendation. The most novel element is the cabin control panel, which governs not only temperature and pressure but the inertial and gravitational environment: the pilot can dial in a portion of the vehicle's acceleration, or select a background of 0 g or 1 g.

Motion is commanded with a pair of six-degree-of-freedom joysticks at the edges of the armrests, operated by force rather than displacement. Here the author identifies a problem the paper admits it cannot solve: the hand can resolve speed settings of ±2 mph only over a span of 0 to 45 mph, while the craft ranges from zero to relativistic speed. The provisional answer is a trigger or buttons that set the scale, so that in one setting full joystick force equals a driving speed and in another 0.9 c. Even the neutral hand position is specified: 35° upward and 25° forward.

Chapter 4 ends modestly: "it is probably premature to engage in specific research on cockpits for propulsion physics." Physics research would yield more insight. The author suggests game simulations and science fiction as test beds, but warns they may favor a "wow effect" over usability, and proposes studying the controls of exploration submarines, which also move in six degrees of freedom.

Significance

Among AAWSAP's twelve technical areas, the paper mainly serves human interface, and to a lesser extent control and human effects, through its discussion of motion sickness and isolating the crew from acceleration. Its distinctiveness in the series lies in the direction of its question: most DIRDs ask whether a technology is possible; this one assumes it is and asks what happens to the person inside.

It has two layers of different quality. Chapter 2 summarizes established, footnoted aviation human-factors knowledge; Chapter 1 rests on physics the author explicitly places at the thought-experiment stage. The report contains no simulations, no tests on human subjects and no engineering calculations, and says so. It cites another DIRD in the series, DIA-08-1003-012, on brain-machine interfaces, which is released in this batch as DOW-UAP-D130.

The paper does not mention UFOs, UAP, "unidentified" craft or any sighting. As the official summary also stresses, the report "does not describe an existing or emerging vehicle class," and the only illustration of the vehicle itself is openly assembled from science-fiction craft.

Key People

Locations

Key Concepts

Notable Quotes

"Breakthroughs in propulsion physics (such as the control over gravitational or inertial forces, propellant-less space drives, and even faster-than-light travel) are not imminent; however, enough progress has been made to allow for thoughtful speculation about their nature and implications." -- page 6

"Objectively, the propulsion physics predictions offered in this report should be interpreted as informed conjectures or, at best, well-reasoned speculations." -- page 7

"Probably the most significant and perplexing difference for breakthrough-era cockpits is that the sensations of motion inside the vehicle will not necessarily match the motion of the vehicle itself." -- page 8

"To be explicit, the physics and engineering to create such situations do not yet exist." -- page 15

"Without the familiar visual and vestibular cues directly available to the pilot, it becomes vitally important for the cockpit displays to provide reliable and instinctive cues for the pilot to aptly judge the position, orientation, and motion of the vehicle." -- page 15

"The extreme high speed of breakthrough spacecraft will demand that automated flight controls take precedence over the pilot's manual flight control." -- page 18

"Regardless of the sophistication of the technology, a weak link in these systems is the human mind itself; that is, thoughts can wander." -- page 33

"Given the incomplete body of knowledge concerning futuristic propulsion and maintaining cognizance of ongoing human-factors research, it is probably premature to engage in specific research on cockpits for propulsion physics." -- page 48