The proposed integrated AoA system addresses a key area within NASA's safety research, specifically "develop and demonstrate products to address technologies, simulation capabilities and procedures for reducing flight risk in areas of attitude and energy aircraft state awareness." Our proposed system advances the state of the art in detecting, predicting and preventing a major GA safety problem in real-time, loss of control due to aerodynamic stall. AAG's derived AoA algorithm, coupled with our proposed in-situ flap position estimation algorithm, can be used in concert with a sensed AoA system to provide redundant sources of AoA that are not dependent on the same set of sensors. Highly accurate and redundant AoA information is a key input for NASA's research in detecting and recovering from off-nominal states, including control upset prevention, resilient controls, envelope protection systems, and detecting and recovering from control surface position errors in future aircraft, whether the control surface failed or the sensor feeding back its position failed. Highly accurate AoA information as well as the haptic feedback and the head-mounted display can both be applied to enabling NASA's On-Demand Mobility research to move towards manned vehicles that may be operated by passengers who are not experienced pilots, significantly reducing accidents due to loss of control, loss of attitude awareness, and controlled flight into terrain.
AAG and our industry avionics contacts believe that there is tremendous commercial potential for our integrated AoA system for GA, which addresses the leading cause of fatal GA accidents, Loss of Control, and is a substantial improvement over the commercial systems that are now being developed. Our haptic feedback system could also be used to prevent Controlled Flight into Terrain. The development of a cost-effective head-mounted display suitable for GA opens the door to displaying PFD, navigation, hazard (traffic, terrain, etc.), and other information, including a simple attitude display to prevent a non-instrument pilot losing attitude awareness upon blundering into IMC.
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