Toward integrating terrain and traffic constraints.

Future airspace operations will allow flight crews to plan and fly their own preferred route and time of arrival without much intervention from air traffic control. Thereby, pilots will become more responsible for planning their own route while maintaining safe separations from traffic and/or terrain. This demands strategic and tactical planning tools that supports pilots in these tasks. This work focused on supporting the airborne separation assurance task in the vertical plane by means of portraying traffic and terrain conflict zones onto an enhanced Vertical Situation Display. In a simulator evaluation the experimental display was compared to a baseline display that only showed a terrain profile and intruder aircraft location relative to ownship.