Avionics News May 2012 - 56

LOW-COST FLIGHT DATA MONITORING
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Customers can choose between a dedicated, TSO’d cigar lighter for power ($89) or a TSO C-71-certified 28-volt power source ($500). External GPS antennas are optional. Recent Track Record Gosselin recalls a recent case where the service detected low-level buzzing. He got an alert and looked up the flight. The playback showed a rented Cirrus SR22 had flown 8 feet above a frozen lake at 167 knots. After looking at other portions of the playback, Gosselin saw the pilot flew so close to a mountaintop ski resort that Gosselin could hear the pull-up alert from the aircraft’s ground proximity warning system. In another case a small Canadian re-

gional airline suspected that some pilots were padding their logbooks to add hours to their flights so they would qualify more quickly for their airline transport pilot licenses. The pilots were costing the airline money, because they were causing premature engine maintenance, Gosselin noted. The operator is in trials with WiFlight units. In another case, the Wi-Flight device survived a fatal vertical impact at close to 150 miles per hour, Gosselin said. The company makes no claim to crash-survivability, but its recorder was the only part recovered from the crash. Wi-Flight was able to extract information from the recorder, although some was lost because the device was trying to save data at the time of the crash. Since the event was determined to have been caused deliberately, rath-

er than as a result of an aircraft defect, no investigation is ongoing. In the violence of the impact, the recorder separated from its bracket, the back of the unit popped out and the battery fell out. Wi-Flight plans to change the bracket design to make it more crashresistant, Gosselin said. Future Plans Wi-Flight is developing two additional recorders, the GTA02 Plus for helicopter flight data monitoring and the GTA04, which will include all GTA02 and GTA02 Plus features along with an onboard video camera and 3.75-generation cellular uploading. The GTA02 Plus will add a barometric altitude source as well as an on-board attitude heading reference system for unusual attitude detection. The hardware for the project is complete and in stock, Gosselin said. But, the AHRS software still needs work, and the company is looking for qualified helicopter operators for beta testing. The GTA02 Plus device is expected to sell for around $695. The Wi-Flight GTA04 HD, or highdefinition video recorder, will add cockpit video, using either an embedded or remote-mounted USB camera upgrade, and 3.75-generation cellular, supporting 5.76-megabits-per-second uploads. That’s the same rate as the Apple iPhone 4, according to Gosselin. The challenge is high-resolution video represents a huge amount of data – more than 1 gigabyte per hour of data. This would be time-consuming to upload over an Internet link. But, Wi-Flight has designed a way to automate the upload. It is developing a method to make lowresolution video available on the Internet in a matter of minutes while making high-resolution segments available on demand. The 3G upload will be available for all data except the high-resolution video if the customer desires. “But, we will only do hi-res video over Wi-Fi,” Gosselin said. “The Wi-Flight HD device should be available this summer for $1,495. Being

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Avionics News May 2012

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