The structural health of airframes is often monitored by analysis of the frequency of occurrence matrix (FOOM) produced afer eachjight. Each cell in the matrix records a stress event of a particular severity. These matrices are used to determine how much of the aircrafr’s life has been used up in each jiight. Unfortunately, the sensors that produce this data are subject to degradation themselve...

Automated systems assisting pilots in the achievement of their essential operating tasks have been one answer provided by the Airframe manufacturers to the problems raised by the present democratization of the Commercial Air Transport. The predicted evolutions of the world air traffic in the next two decades are extremely promising and challenging: indeed they raise very severe issues in terms ...

In today’s business climate, aerospace companies are more than ever in need of rational methods and techniques that provide insights as to the best strategies which may be pursued for increased profitability and risk mitigation. However, the use of subjective, anecdotal decision-making remains prevalent due to the absence of analytical methods capable of capturing and forecasting future needs. ...

The presented work is focusing on the wind estimation and airframe identification based on real flight experiments as part of the SkyScanner project. The overall objective of this project is to estimate the local wind field in order to study the formation of cumulus-type clouds with a fleet of autonomous mini-UAVs involving many aspects including flight control and energy harvesting. For this p...

Small robot helicopters are becoming a popular research platform due to the availability of off-the-shelf components and their suitability for useful applications. We describe the Oxford Aerial Tracking System (OATS) that we are commissioning which takes a commercial airframe and low-level flight controller, and adapts these for use in applications requiring the visual tracking of ground target...