4th EASA Rotorcraft Symposium

The development of Night Vision Goggles (NVGs) and relative Night Image Vision System (NVIS) civil certified helicopters is growing steadily in the last years with the aim of reducing accidents and improving awareness of night flights. While we expect to see more and more civil helicopters flying NVGs, there are however many new issues not covered by current regulations, if compared to a classical approval. For instance a subsequent change in the cockpit of even a small instrument emitting non NVG compatible lights could compromise the entire approval and operation. This introduces challenges in the classification of changes and in the helicopter NVIS configuration management. Continued airworthiness should account for leak checks during normal cockpit maintenance and repairs, thus requiring new skills, today not requested in the qualification or license. NVGs could also be subject to unapproved change of filters, which can affect compatibility. Finally, NVGs while reducing classical accidents (lik e CFIT) can introduce new kind of occurrences related to their operation.

In order to cope with all those factors, several specific elements are considered by EASA already during the certification phase; the practical implementation of a safe NVIS environment requires however coordination between the all parties including operators, EASA, the relative National Aviation Authorities of the state of Registry and manufactures.

To improve awareness, EASA will dedicate a session of the Rotorcraft Forum specifically to NVIS. All interested parties will have an opportunity of discussing and sharing their point of view on current situation, proposed solutions and way forward.