FlyONSPEED.org  Reduce Loss of Control Risk

The FlyONSPEED team is a group of aviation professionals with experience in general aviation, airline and military flying.  All of our volunteers are active members of the EAB community.  Our pilots are former instructors at the USAF's Fighter Weapons School or experimental test pilots and active civilian flight instructors.  They have extensive experience developing, testing and teaching aircraft handling techniques.  Our engineers are also pilots, and our team members are volunteers--we do this work because we enjoy it and want to give something back to the aviation community.  Our objective is to help reduce loss-of-control mishaps by merging lessons learned and best practices from all aviation communities to benefit the EAB community. Our hardware designs, software and training resources are open source and available to anyone.  FlyONSPEED.org is an IRS 501(c)3 non-profit, collaborative organization dedicated to public safety and we gladly accept donations to support our work. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  We are always willing to collaborate with folks, organizations or manufacturers interested in our work.      

 

The project was started by two retired Air Force aviators and an engineer who simply wanted to adapt a successful military AOA system to their personal airplanes. Initial efforts used the AOA signal from a commercial EFIS equipped with a coefficient of pressure AOA sensor.  A small computer read the serial output from the EFIS and generated the aural AOA signal.  The initial focus was simply to get the system working and demonstrate the utility of the tone.  The hardware developed in this initial effort is called the "Gen 1" system.     

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After developing and beta testing the first generation ONSPEED system with a group of volunteers representing a cross-section of the the EAB community, we realized that we could do better.  The biggest lesson learned was how critical calibration of any AOA system is, and how challenged a coefficient of pressure system can be to provide accurate, usable AOA information.  Based on this experience and with the help of aerodynamicist Dr. David Rogers, Professor Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy, the FlyONSPEED team set out to develop a stand-alone AOA air data and attitude platform that was easy to install, calibrate and operate in any EAB airplane equipped with coefficient of pressure sensors.  The system can accurately measure absolute AOA to within a 1/2 degree 40 times per second and provide an accurate, damped audio cue to the pilot at G onset rates of up to 4 G's per second. We call the new system "Gen 2."  The Gen 2 system also incorporates an IMU (inertial measurement unit) that provides acceleration and rate information that is used to assist with calibration and filtering as well as supplementing performance at high AOA and sideslip angles.  It also allows for the application of modern 3D audio cuing (moving the direction of sound in a stereo headset) to provide "eyes out" sideslip cues to the pilot.