Helicopter Brownout - Remote Sensing Center
Helicopter Brownout
Our signature project in remote sensing was a project to do terrain classification to avoid helicopter brownout - basically trying to pick landing zones that won't kill the pilots.
This all started with Col Mitch 'Rico' Rios, who brought the problem to NPS in 2003. He started a long line of USMC helicopter pilots who analyzed different ways of approaching the problem of understanding landing zones. After a fair amount of effort, the problem was reduced to a problem in characterizing good and bad landing zones. (including work with commercial systems by Anthony W. Davis, 2007; and Christine Rabaja in 2009). This concluded in some sense with a MERIT program that involved NPS and NRL (Ralph Fiedler). The algorithms we developed were transitioned to the MI 513th, and have proven valuable for operations.
rco, 5/25/2017
Polarimetric radar image (VV polarization) after new Brownout Algorithm threshold values are applied. Red = Brownout likely; Sienna = Unknown/Ambiguous; Green = Non-Brownout. From Rabaja (2009)