The Institute of Aerospace Technologies has held a public engagement event held at Esplora Interactive Science Centre, as project Smart Flight Data Monitoring (SMARTFDM) is brought to an end.
The event was attended by the Minister for Equality, Research and Innovation Dr Owen Bonnici, MCST Chairman Dr Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, researchers and the general public.
Flight data monitoring forms an integral part of safety systems within flight operations. Typical civil aircraft have a number of sensors which log various parameters during flight. The number of sensors may range between 100 to more than 500 and these parameters are recorded at different rates varying from 1Hz to 16Hz depending on how important the parameter is, and how rapidly it changes. After each flight this data is analysed and if a parameter is found to exceed its maximum threshold then this gets flagged.
If a cause for concern is identified, the crew may be called in for interview, procedures may be changed and any lessons learned will be passed on to other pilots within the same airline and beyond.
However, this is challenging for two main reasons:
It is laborious and data intensive. The focus at any one time is on the behaviour of a single aircraft. This makes it difficult to derive significant patterns from aircraft fleet. Current state of the art flight data analysis software only allows to look at one piece of the puzzle at a time but never at the whole picture.
SmartFDM addressed these challenges by adopting a non-supervised machine learning algorithm. Following pre-processing, this was able to establish trends in the approach and touchdown portions of aircraft fleet, highlighting anomalies in a few flights. These anomalies were also traced back to specific flight parameters. The development of such techniques are beyond the current state of the art. The project outputs resulted in a number of peer reviewed publications and is currently in the process of applying for IP protection.
The project was led by Dr Robert Camilleri from the Institute of Aerospace Technologies in collaboration of Dr Gianluca Valentino from the Dept. of Communications and Computer Engineering and industrial partners QuAero.
Smart FDM is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Technology Development Programme.