System will enable crews to perform post-flight analysis using manufacturer's server
Air Logistics plans to purchase 120 low-cost flight data recording systems for the company's fleet of Bell 206 single and Bell 407 multi-engine utility helicopters supporting the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Aircraft Logging and Event Recording for Training and Safety (Alerts) device was jointly developed over the past year by North Dakota-based Appareo Systems and Bristow Group, parent company of Air Logistics.
"We've been looking for a way to monitor and improve pilot performance without looking over their shoulders," says Michael Suldo, president of Air Logistics.
Alerts, priced at $4,950 for the airborne segment, is a self- contained, self-calibrating inertial measurement and flight recording system that flight departments can use for post-flight safety analysis, event reconstruction and trending. The system, weighing in at less than 0.5kg (1lb), independently tracks an aircraft's movements using GPS navigation, micro electromechanical systems, gyros and on-board software, recording as much as 300 flight hours in internal, crash-hardened memory or 170h on a removable card. Motion about the roll, pitch and yaw axes is recreated to better than 1º, says Appareo.
The manufacturer plans to charge $350 a year per aircraft for the hosted ground-based analysis software, plus ¢95 per recorded hour to store the information. Companies can also archive their information for ¢10 an hour and pay a "nominal" fee to later retrieve the data for analysis.
To perform post-flight analysis, crews will remove the memory card, download the data to Appareo's server and review the flight using software tools that include a 3D replay. Flight departments can also set triggers to look for trends, such as the combination of heading changes of more than 30º while flying at lower than 300ft and at airspeeds more than 30kt (56km/h).
Air Logistics is flying two units as part of the ongoing US Federal Aviation Administration supplemental type certificate approval effort, expected to be completed before June. Appareo says Alerts can be installed in about 1.5h and requires only a connection to aircraft power. Future upgrades could include wireless data transfer, voice recording and vibration monitoring.
Source: Flight International
