PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Night Vision Goggles (NVG discussions merged)
Old 30th Jul 2009, 06:49
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Helmet Fire - a lot of pilots tend to have the goggles too close to their eyes in the mistaken belief that it will give them a better field of view - when you are looking down a pair of toilet roll tubes you can see very little more by jamming them against your eyeballs than you can with them a comfortable distance (say 2 cm) away.

Personally I have them as far forward as they will go on the adjusters simply because I get a much better view inside the cockpit without having to crane my neck into odd angles. Any small loss (and I mean small) in FoV is made up for by scanning which I would have to do anyway. The advantage is definitely clear when you come onto mixed-light ops where glancing under the goggles is easier and the decision to de-goggle (if neccessary) can be made whilst comparing the two pictures. The added bonus is that you are not limited to your pool of white light when cliff/mountain winching and you retain the awareness of obstacles and terrain, especially important if you have to deal with an emergency whilst winching.

As I mentioned in the previous post, operating on white light whilst still wearing the goggles is only really feasible if you have the eye-relief set well forward and it is something worth trying on a training flight before doing it operationally.

Not everyone finds it comfortable to start with and it is not always a perfect solution - I was winching at the bottom of a narrow valley a few weeks ago with hover references on white light but an escape route (down the valley) that had to be flown on NVG (and quickly if a flyaway from an engine fail was to be feasible) and I was working hard against disorientation since I also needed to use my NVG references to help stop me drifting since the terrain was sloping and the white light references were moving (trees and grass blowing in the wind/downwash). I had an instrument style abort option if required but it was one of those situations where neither pure white light nor NVG hover would give me the hover accuracy and the flyaway option.
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