Study and design of flight data recording systems for military aircraft.

Abstract

Investigation of aircraft wreckage does not provide crash investigators with adequate information. Crash-protected flight recorder data is invaluable when determining accident cause factors. Inertial navigation systems provide an excellent source of highly accurate flight parameters. Nonvolatile solid state memory is available which can replace failure prone magnetic tape recording in flight recorder systems. Microprocessors are available with the capability of compressing flight data for solid state memory storage. Data compression trials indicate that a flight data recording system using microcomputer preprocessing and nonvolatile solid state memory is feasible