Miniaturized Flight Data Recorder for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Ultralight Aircrafts

Flight data recorder is a device that records various flight parameters and is able to survive the crash for increasing aviation safety. Aircrafts which can have an impact on the safety of flights in the airspace are becoming smaller and more accessible. Good examples are unmanned aerial vehicles or ultralight aircrafts. It would be appropriate to equip these objects with flight data recorders in order to ensure that every crash will be accompanied to improvement of the aviation safety. While the legitimacy of FDR (flight data recorder) installation into manned objects is pretty obvious, for a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) it is not so clear. There are some cases that the UAV has dropped and damaged some facilities or even dropped on human, additionally loss of often very expensive object should occur as rarely as possible. In both cases, the lifting capacity is very limited so there is requirement to significantly reduce the weight of the recording device. Minimum dimensions and weight are strongly dependent on the assumed conditions of the accident and on the size of the aircraft. The paper describes design of the electronics module, partial concepts of the whole flight data recorder and the first crash survival tests.