Rotorcraft Crash Sensor for Active Safety Systems and Mishap Dynamics Recording

Every year hard landings or crashes expose rotorcraft pilots and aircrew to potentially injurious dynamic forces. Current injury mitigation technologies have been designed based on data collected in a small number of full-scale controlled tests, component tests in laboratories, and insights gleaned from incident investigations. Thus, the current knowledge base is limited and partially relies on “substantial assumptions and averaging” as noted in AHS-Paper-2015-351. If we can capture real-world data from actual incidents, the safety community will have the information necessary to feed the design of simulations, airframe structures, and both passive and active safety systems. The Rotorcraft Crash Sensor for Active Safety Systems and Mishap Dynamics Recording (RoCS) product will help to improve aircrew crash survivability and injury mitigation in Naval Aviation platforms. The objective of this proposal by Diversified Technical Systems (DTS) is to build on DTS technologies to develop a Rotorcraft Crash Sensor for Active Safety Systems and Mishap Dynamics Recording (RoCS).  DTS will incorporate groundbreaking electronics, accelerometers, and angular-rate sensors as well as technology developed for other military and automotive projects, to fast track the development of the RoCS. The RoCS will meet all objectives of this solicitation which include dynamic crash event recording and real-time crash event detection which will help to kick-off the next generation of injury mitigation systems.