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Aviation History
1964
1964 - 0464.PDF
FLIGHT International, 20 February 1964 283 FLIGHT SYSTEM8 SURVEY Royston Midas CMM 7SE tape deck and recovery- aids as installed for ejection from an aircraft Strictly for the Record legislative programme abroad will enable foreign manufacturers to produce competitive equipment. The MoA View One reason why the British have been slower is that the mills of democracy grind rather more slowly in this country. The authorities tend to lean further backwards—some might say too far backwards—to ensure that the operators have every oppor- tunity to air their views. There have been protests, naturally; the purchase, installation, maintenance and weight penalties of a six- channel flight recorder of the type specified can involve an airline in an annual cost of perhaps as much as £10,000 per aircraft. But the objections have been on points of technical detail rather than on the principle of the thing. Few can any longer doubt that a properly designed and installed flight recorder is the best long-term means of improving air safety that can be bought for money. When it is suggested that the British and French are ahead in supersonic airliners Americans will say that it is more important to be best than it is to be first. This is appropriate in the case of flight recorders. Britain has been a pioneer in their design and in their application, and slower implementation of flight recorder legislation is certainly not due to lack of technical expertize. It is just that the Ministry of Aviation's flight safety people, to use the fashionable term, have been sizing up the cost-effectiveness of the programme. A comprehensive research programme, the £fm bill for which is being paid by MoA, was launched in December 1962 as a com- bined operation involving BOAC and BEA (whose aircraft have been the guinea pigs) and also the ARB and, on the structures side, the RAE. Additionally, arrangements were made for some NASA recorders to be fitted into a BOAC Boeing 707 and the operational programme has made the maximum use of NASA experience. BOAC have reported as follows on their contribution to the pro- gramme and on their future intentions for the carriage of recorders, including meeting the mandatory requirements:— "There are, of course, a number of flight recorders on the market from which BOAC could choose. These differ by recording different types or quantities of information on different materials—e -8'» paper, magnetic tape or wire. BOAC has been engaged in establishing clearly its own requirements, over and above those called for by the Ministry, and evaluating the various flight recorders against this specification. "The corporation is in a very good position to speak with authority on the subject of flight recording. It has been carrying out this work on its own aircraft since 1955, Mr A. S. Lucking of the Electrical Development Group specializing in this work. It has been awarded a long-term American NASA contract for similar work and it is the main contractor in a Ministry of Aviation project. "It would not be difficult for BOAC to fit a flight recorder pro- viding only the minimum six channels of information as specified by the Ministry. But this would be to record limited data in respect of accidents only and BOAC's experience has led it to expect information that can be put to work on a day-to-day basis, Providing information on an aeroplane's operation that has already, °y practical experience, been proved of" value for engineering, raasntenance and flight operation purposes. 'As a result of the experience BOAC is calling for a Flight °ata Acquisition system that will give this continuous and valuable information over and above the Ministry's minimum requirement. "In terms of output, BOAC will be recording 200,000 hours of routine aircraft operation by 1965-66. The resultant mass of data must be easily processed and translated into intelligent information on which action can, if necessary, be quickly taken. "This is one of the reasons why, after studying the whole market, BOAC is at present evaluating certain flight recorder systems. It remains to be proved that these systems will be able to give as many channels of information as we need or that the problems associated with the presentation of data in the several forms in which it will be required have been entirely solved. "No decision on the final choice has yet been made. The data acquisition systems being studied will be tested under normal operational conditions against readings taken simultaneously on trace recorders whose accuracy has been proved by several years of service. (Trace recorders use a thin beam of light to record a continuous line of information on sensitized paper stored in reels which are too bulky for mass recording operations.) "Eventually the corporation hopes to select a flight recorder as part of an overall system that will be compact and robust, that will provide its information in an easily read form, that will be able to record much more information than the basic six parameters re- quired by law, that will be unaffected by its environment and that will have an accuracy capability not only sufficient to meet the Ministry requirements but also to meet the onerous demands of airline aircraft performance recording." While BOAC have thus stated their intentions with regard to flight recorders and are reported to be investigating as many as nine different proposals from British manufacturers, BEA have taken an altogether different stand. They are apparently simply aiming to meet the basic MoA requirement plus a few extra parameters, with a wire recorder designed by S. Davall & Sons and signal condition- ing electronics by Plessey. Eight aircraft have been involved in the joint programme: three BOAC 707s, three BOAC Comet 4s and two BEA Comet 4Bs. The first NASA recorder was fitted and flying in a BOAC 707 early in 1960 and all eight aircraft were flying with different recorders and different channels, by March 1963. The programme will obviously be extended to include the VC10, Trident and One-Eleven. Something like 20,000 flying hours of data have been produced in the first year. Data processing, which has been done for the MoA by Bensen Lehner, is one of the biggest headaches. When the Ministry of Aviation's flight recorder requirement for the SST is finalized, involving flight recorders producing up to possibly 100 parameters instead of the initial six, a simply staggering amount of information will be produced. The safety engineers could easily be looking for they know not what. One lesson soon learned from the research programme has been the difficulty of getting things to work—in particular the problem of spurious inputs. A flight recorder is only as good as the engin- eering of its inputs. If there is anything more pointless than too many flight recorder readings it is spurious readings. The programme has yielded useful by-products. Completely Continued on page 2M The Royston CMM 7SE under its parachute with beacon aerial deployed above the canopy. VHF/ UHF beacon, floatation bag and marker dye are in- itiated on immersion
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