Animation and Analysis of Shipboard Aircraft Recovery Using Ships Geo-Referenced Data

The Navy has identified a need for post mission digital debrief of shipboard operations using high fidelity, merged and corrected, moving ship and aircraft positional information.This capability will provide the warfighter the ability to debrief and analyze pilot performance in the shipboard recovery phase of maritime operations. Currently, land-based operations are depicted accurately from takeoff to landing with incredible fidelity. But, an as-yet untried extension to this concept, important due to the maritime nature of U.S. Navy operations, is to provide the same fidelity for operations in which landing occurs aboard a moving platform. Doing so requires the integration of the ships position and movement with those of the aircraft. Therefore there is a need to correct, compensate and display merged moving vehicle (ship and aircraft) positions at a fidelity level that support post-landing debriefing, while enabling and allowing automated and user defined corrections to data. This effort will result in implementation of data compensation algorithms, aircraft carrier specific configurations resulting in compensated data with increased fidelity necessary for post flight debrief of embarked operations. The implementation will provide techniques for interacting with the algorithm and manipulating data for the purposes of increasing the accuracy of the playback.