Normally when I'm NOE flying, I'm watching the terrain, looking for obstacles, getting an eyeflick out to the right for the gps or the top left for exact speed if we're in the bleed/landing phases; but generally I get my altitude and airspeed from watching how fast the treetops are passing by above the rotor hub
Visual clutter's a killer in that HUD and I didn't see config options to (for example) turn off everything bar the AH bars and an analog speedometer or analog altimeter.
I *do* like the FFAR aiming reticle. That's nice. But look at the biggest most prominent number there - it's your bearing, the second-most useless number you could ask (fuel being the most useless - even the default HUD doesn't give that a number, just a bar that changes colour as it becomes something you should worry about; but half a tank will see you through our longest mission without ever shutting down the engine, so it's like having a gauge that tells you how much air you have in the cabin).
The most important number is your airspeed - and that's still this tiny little thing away in the left side buried in a low-contrast colour against grass and trees.
The altitude is given huge importance - but if you're flying low enough that a single metre matters, then you *don't* stop to read low-contrast text or examine bars that are vanishingly small or worse, autoscaling so you have to figure out the scale. You keep your eyes on where you're going so as to not fly into terrain.
Having an analogue dial big enough to read with peripheral vision I can dig:
I actually think that's a decent set of gauges to have - even in that tiny image, you can tell that your speed gauge is three-quarters of the way round which is way too high to do proper NOE flight and you need to bleed down to half-way round for low altitude cruise and to about the southeast position to do NOE flight. And even better, you can customise that dashboard - remove any gauges you don't want to clutter the place up, put them anywhere you're happy with and add more if you want them.
If I had the time to get proficient in the AFS, I'd do it just for those gauges alone.
Honestly, unless there are *serious* options for decluttering I wouldn't use that HMD display. It's not that it's too easy; it's that it only
looks easy, but it's actually overloading you with work in flight.
