The prime objective of the first part of this project is to study and prepare an effective integration of future Air Traffic Management into civil aircraft flight decks and thereby to provide an efficient participation of the European Community to the world-wide Air Traffic Management standardization and improvement process. In association to the above, the new aircraft systems, such as landing and taxiing aids, and Man-Machine-Interface (MMI), second part of the project, will be without doubt, a leading factor of the future Air Traffic Management system concepts being planned for introduction into Europe in the next decade and beyond.
The Human-machine interface system and processing study covered two work lines: basic techniques of Human-Machine Interface (HMI) domain have been investigated, and demonstration/evaluation of display and control/designation systems have been performed.

Within the image generation key technology field, thanks to functional requirements clarifications and analysis of possible technical solutions and architectures, the results particularly introduce new developments on graphical language compilers and images processing techniques.

Within the demonstration/evaluation field, the studies performed confirmed that the man-in-the-loop systems particularly need prototype implementation into part-task-simulations. This method has been useful as new capabilities can be initiated effortless and bottleneck points can be studied quickly within either the display or control/designation domain. Thus the results are not only useful for FANSTIC II chosen applications but also for future HMI projects.
Specifically the study focuses on the tools to evaluate/validate the concepts and new aircraft systems/interfaces needed to fulfil future ATM capability:

1) Specify and realise harmonized European standard simulation tools to validate future ATM systems and MMI devices. These tools will include all necessary interfaces (eg for air/ground link, traffic generator, ATC station or aircraft simulator) in order to prepare the coupling of simulation sites (ATC and/or aircraft) enabling a global air/ground approach to the ATM,
2) Study and specify the required airborne functions, architecture, operational procedure and associated Man-Machine-Interfaces (MMI) through the identification of the future ATC Air-Ground coordination data communication exchange requirements. Evaluate/validate the results through a set of selected ATC applications in a realistic environment using harmonized simulation tools.

Taking into account the necessary integration of the future ATM, new landing aids, and the induced additional information provided to the flight crew, the objective of the second part of this project is to develop advanced flight deck concepts for civil aircraft to optimize overall MMI and aircraft performance to comply with future information handling capability requirements while maintaining/increasing the present safety standards in spite of eg the future traffic increase at airports and in terminal zones:

3) Study a new concept and its integration into the cockpit of weather prediction and landing/taxiing system based on a multi-function radar,
4) Develop centralized means to control and inform the flight crew by optimizing the main human communication channels (visual, aural and tactile) to improve information assimilation.