Flight, voice. (&video?) recorders for GA

[Don Knight(Guest)]

Flight recorders that can survive rough times should be makeable at a more reasonable cost now that EFIS and Engine date is so readily available.  The biggest obstacle might be the availablity of the necessary time to develop an item such as this.  It would be great for Experimental aircraft, but really should be in the TAA (Technically advanced aircraft) like the Cirrus, Lancair, Eclipse, and Adams etc.
There is no requirement for such an item in GA or EXP. so a good device could be added without the high cost of extensive certification.

 

[Chasspin]

Flight data recorder is a great idea and would round out the Dynon product line! I have been looking into designing a small compact FDR using a compact flash as the recording media. The dynon products are a perfect for such a system. Here's my thoughts.

I have been looking at a single board computer made by Persistor that has several serial ports and a compact flash card to record the data and runs on 3.5 volts. If take the data from the EFIS D-10, EMS D-10, and the standard NMEA -183 data from GPS and merge the data into a single data stream that is time stamped by the GPS and stored in a text format to the compact flash in a PC readable file. Note: The Dynon data may have to be downsampled to to a 1-10 Hz data rate since most GPS systems output at 1Hz.

Each message would then have The following data for example.

Time, Lat, Lon, Ground Speed, Course, Heading, IAS, Altitude, G forces, AOA, Roll, Pitch. Turn Rate, OAT, RPM, Fuel Flow, CHT, EGT, ManPress, Carb temp, oil temp, Fuel Press, etc.

This data then can be used to calculate other data and also feed 3rd party software to generate performance charts for the aircraft. This is a flight test engineers dream. You can create test cards fly the profiles and plot the performance data in Excel for example

I would suggest the data be stored as a loop recorder and then the user can continously store flight data and pull the data when needed and have the most current flight along with the previous flight hours depending on the size of the compact flash card used.

If the data message was 500 bytes stored at 10 Hz a 1Gb compact flash could store about 2 million messages and record for 55 hours before looping over the oldest data.

I used the D-10 in a flight test experiment for some research I am doing with the U of Wash to flight test a sensor (I sent the published paper to Gillian). I recorded the data from the GPS, d-10 and the sensor on a laptop in flight. The data was then comipled by hand and plotted in Excel. I also took the data and wrote an API plug-in X-plane to read the data and replay the flight for a visual demonstration in a presentation I gave.

I would be glad to work with you guys if you are interested in creating a FDR product.

Charlie