Your Flight Data is on Us!!

The Flight Data Tracker (FDT) developed at SUNY Fredonia is a system for transmitting and saving flight safety data in real-time on the cloud that is otherwise only stored in an aircraft’s Flight Data Recorder (aka FDR or “black box.”). The FDT implements novel features of live radio-based transmission and flight data charting making it an affordable method of real-time flight data delivery. FDT has been granted non-provisional patent #US-20150203212-A1. Since the grant of the US patent, ADRL (Advanced Data Research Lab) was established in SUNY Fredonia and an aviation data analysis company agreed to mentor our development efforts. This year, we won a summer RSCA grant from SUNY Research Foundation to design and build a prototype FDT system using SDR (Software Defined Radio) equipment and one FDR that captured flight parameters. The prototype has been completed successfully and we are able to transmit, capture, plot and analyze the flight data in real-time. This short paper is about the FDT prototype development project stages, its challenges, its results and future directions.