Plain English Meaning
A flight director that tells you what to do with the cyclic in two directions — nose up or down, and bank left or right — but does not give you guidance on the collective.
Full Definition
A flight director display mode that presents guidance on two axes — pitch and roll — typically shown as a pair of command bars (or a single crossbar pair) that the pilot follows to maintain the desired flightpath. In a helicopter AFCS, two-cue guidance does not include collective (power/vertical) command information.
Context Anchor
Seen in helicopter instrument flying when describing the stabilization system, automatic flight control system, or flight director display.
Derivation
‘Cue’ here means a guidance signal or prompt shown to the pilot. ‘Two-cue’ literally means two channels of guidance — pitch and roll. A three-cue system adds a third channel for collective.
Why Pilots Care
Provides decoupled, precise attitude guidance that reduces pilot workload and improves accuracy when flying solely by instruments in a helicopter.
Intuition Check
Two cue does not mean two warnings or two checklist prompts. Here, cue means a visual steering signal, and two cue means separate pitch and roll signals.
Example Sentence 1
The helicopter’s two-cue flight director gave him pitch and roll guidance down the ILS, but he had to work the collective himself to hold the glideslope.
Example Sentence 2
With two cue selected, the horizontal bar gave pitch guidance while the vertical bar commanded bank during the missed approach climb.