Wings Magazine

News Products
The Aerodynamic Performance Monitor

Feb. 18, 2009 – No aircraft in service today is equipped with a system to monitor the performance and safety margin of its airfoils under icing conditions.


February 18, 2009  By Administrator

aeroperform
The Aerodynamic Performance Monitor

Unlike conventional systems, APM employs wing and tail-mounted sensors that actively monitor the state of the airflow at these critical locations.  Competing technologies use angle-of-attack sensors that are typically fuselage mounted, and have no direct indication of the aerodynamic conditions where they matter most.  Icing detectors also do little to help the crew fly the aircraft in icing conditions, and many aircraft have been lost despite the their crews’ obviously being aware of the existence of icing conditions, as was the case in the 1994 American Eagle accident at Roselawn
Indiana.
 
APM addresses two other critical conditions for which there is currently no protection provided by traditional systems: tailplane stalls, and wing contamination during takeoff.  Tailplane stalls are insidious and dangerous, because they typically cause a violent loss of control with little or no warning.  Even worse, recovery from a tailplane stall requires completely differing techniques from a traditional stall recovery, and the outcome of an inappropriate recovery is catastrophic in most cases.

Attempted takeoffs with ice-contaminated wings have resulted in numerous accidents, including the loss of Air Florida Flight 90 in 1982, the Air Ontario Dryden disaster of 1989, and the US Air crash in New York harbor in 1992.   
 
The APM project was partially funded by a NASA SBIR grant, and has since been extensively tested on numerous aircraft types and in special icing wind-tunnels.  The system is ready for certification and deployment on all categories of general aviation and transport aircraft, before icing needlessly takes any more lives.
 
Marinvent Corporation was founded in 1983 as an aerospace research and development company.  Marinvent has pioneered a number of “disruptive” technologies, including the “paperless cockpit” which earned it an Aviation Week Laureate and the Canadian American Business Achievement Award, among many others.  Marinvent operates a unique human factors simulator and two advanced flight research aircraft.

Contact: John Maris 450-441-6464

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stories continue below