College of Aviation Research Projects

The project was to support aggregation of UAS flight data with commercial, general aviation and surveillance data, to develop enhanced safety analyses for NAS stakeholders, support UAS integration in the NAS, and support the Unmanned Aircraft Safety Team (UAST).

The purpose of the project was to enable the safe integration of UAS in the NAS through building upon existing aviation database and data-sharing efforts encouraged and endorsed by participating government-industry entities. Through this research, a data architecture for unmanned air and ground vehicles and operations was developed in alignment with the FAA’s Aviation Safety Information and Sharing (ASIAS) program.

This project designed and evaluated Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) for unmanned operations and integrated that data into the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) system.  In addition, this project identified current Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) FDM capabilities and practices, including refresh/recording rate and robustness, and developed guidance for a UAS FDM standard.  The UAS community has specific and disparate needs in relation to manned aviation, such as the need for strong cyber-security measures regarding telemetry streams and the storage of sensitive UAS flight data.  This project sought to identify the best governance practices regarding the use and research involved with UAS flight data.  The project team included original members who designed and deployed the National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID) which has successfully integrated and is data-sharing with ASIAS.

This project identified UAS FDM events, including event definitions and exceedances, using the normal ASIAS techniques.  Future phases of this project will include the actual deployment of a UAS database which interfaces with ASIAS similar to other safety reporting programs.