NASA develops 'anti-fog' goggles

The Daily Mail reports.

The goggles can track a pilot's head-movements and overlay runways, towers and potentially other airplanes over their view - an invaluable tool when fog rolls down across an airport.

According to Mashable, the glasses would allow commercial airline pilots to see a virtual version of runways in even the worst weather conditions.

Such glasses represent a portable head-worn display that shows critical flight information such as airspeed, altitude and orientation floating in front of one eye at all times. The NASA display would also track pilots' heads so that an updated virtual outline of an airport's runways and towers always appears wherever they look - allowing them to keep their attention on what's happening outside rather than staring at a chart or tablet.

"If pilots are not familiar with the airport, they have to stop and pull out maps," MSNBC.com quotes Trey Arthur, an electronics engineer at NASA Langley Research Centre in Virginia, as saying.

"This display, in the new world where these routes are going to be digital, can tell them what taxiway they're on, where they need to go, where they're headed, and how well they're tracking the runway's centre line."

Giving pilots better awareness on airport runways swarming with airplanes could prevent catastrophes such as the world's deadliest aviation incident at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, in 1977. A collision there between a jumbo jet trying to take off and another jet sitting on the foggy runway ended in a blazing inferno that killed 583 passengers and crew.