The use of offshore wind farms in Europe to provide a sustainable alternative energy source is now considered normal. Particularly in the North Sea, a large number of wind farms exist with a significant distance from the coast. This is becoming standard practice as larger areas are required to support operations. Efficient transport and monitoring of these wind farms can only be conducted using helicopters. As wind turbines continue to grow in size, there is a need to continuously update operational requirements for these helicopters, to ensure safe operations. This study assesses German regulations for flight corridors within offshore wind farms. A semi-empirical wind turbine wake model is used to generate velocity data for the research flight simulator AVES. The reference offshore wind turbine NREL 5 MW has been used and scaled to represent wind turbine of different sizes. This paper reports result from a simulation study concerning vortex wake encounter during offshore operations. The results have been obtained through piloted simulation for a transport case through a wind farm. Both subjective and objective measures are used to assess the severity of vortex wake encounters.

Most accidents and serious incidents of commercial air transport helicopters occur during standard flight phases, whereby a main cause is pilots’ situational awareness. Enabling pilots to better assess their situational awareness can make an important contribution in reducing the risk of fatal accidents. One approach is to examine a pilot’s gaze behavior with the help of eye tracking. This paper reports the results of a case study with eye tracking measurements during real flight and simulator studies of a standard mission profile. The general gaze behavior is characterized by a dominant, external view, and the airspeed and altitude indicator as the most important flight instruments. A real-world applicability of gaze data obtained in the simulator could be shown.

Helicopters are used for offshore wind farms for maintenance and support flights. The number of helicopter operations is increasing with the expansion of offshore wind energy, which stresses the point that the current German regulations have not yet been validated through scientific analysis. A collaborative research project between DLR, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Stuttgart and the University of Tübingen has been conducted to examine the sizes of the flight corridors on offshore wind farms and the lateral safety clearance for helicopter hoist operations at offshore wind turbines. This paper details the results of piloted helicopter simulations in a realistic offshore wind farm scenario. The far-wake of rotating wind turbines and the near-wake of non-rotating wind turbines have been simulated with high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics under realistic turbulent inflow conditions. The resulting flow fields have been processed by superposition during piloted simulations in the research flight simulator AVES to examine the flight corridors in transit flights and the lateral safety clearance in hovering flights. The results suggest a sufficient size for the flight corridor and sufficient lateral safety clearance at the offshore wind turbines in the considered scenarios.

The integration of control augmentation techniques into helicopter systems aims to assist pilots during the critical phases of shipboard operations to mitigate the effects of ship motion, wind and other environmental factors that can compromise safety. The control augmentation presented in this paper involves the implementation of model following control laws featuring a combination of advanced response types with hold modes to improve helicopter handling qualities. The paper introduces a translational rate command type, relative to the ship, which incorporates Velocity Hold and Position Hold features to assist pilots and automate various stages of the ship deck landing maneuver. An Attitude Command Attitude Hold has been used as a baseline response type for the comparison. A preliminary pilot evaluation of the proposed control laws during a hover operation is presented to assess the impact of control augmentation on the pilot workload, task performance and operational safety. In addition to quantitative task performance data and qualitative pilot rating scales, eye tracking glasses were used as an additional metric to record pilot gaze data providing insights into attention distribution and cognitive demand across different control strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that the implemented control augmentation techniques enable a stabilised hover relative to ship, while also contributing to reduced workload, improved task performance and increased overall safety perception for the pilots.

The integration of control augmentation techniques into helicopter systems aims to assist pilots during the critical phases of shipboard operations to mitigate the effects of ship motion, wind and other environmental factors that can compromise safety. The control augmentation presented in this paper involves the implementation of model following control laws featuring a combination of advanced response types with hold modes to improve helicopter handling qualities. The paper introduces a translational rate command type, relative to the ship, which incorporates Velocity Hold and Position Hold features to assist pilots and automate various stages of the ship deck landing maneuver. An Attitude Command Attitude Hold has been used as a baseline response type for the comparison. A preliminary pilot evaluation of the proposed control laws during a hover operation is presented to assess the impact of control augmentation on the pilot workload, task performance and operational safety. In addition to quantitative task performance data and qualitative pilot rating scales, eye tracking glasses were used as an additional metric to record pilot gaze data providing insights into attention distribution and cognitive demand across different control strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that the implemented control augmentation techniques enable a stabilised hover relative to ship, while also contributing to reduced workload, improved task performance and increased overall safety perception for the pilots.