ARINC Awarded Patent for New Way of Collecting and Using Flight Data

ARINC has been awarded a U.S. patent (7149612) for improved methods of accessing operational data from electronic aircraft systems, including selective monitoring, displaying parameters in near real-time, collecting and storing, and transmitting data to the ground.

The concept can be immediately applied to modern commercial aircraft equipped with QARs (quick access recorders), ARINC believes.  Currently, airlines must physically retrieve the voluminous data for periodic analysis, which can be a costly and time-consuming procedure requiring trained personnel and proprietary analytical systems.

The new method can proactively monitor QARs and other avionics via an onboard network, and record selected data, which can be made immediately available to the pilots, through devices such as EFBs (electronic flight bags), or downlinked in flight to ground-based personnel.  The data also can be manually downloaded after flight on a portable storage medium, or physically carried off the plane on a portable EFB for analysis.

The primary inventor is Rolf Stefani, the senior director of the ARINC Technology Innovation Center.

"There are upwards of 3,000 aircraft using QARs today, and they have no easy way to extract critical data in real time," stated Stefani. "The new ARINC patent provides for much faster visibility into parameters of interest to flight crews and airline management, for both operational and maintenance purposes."

Today QAR data is often collected weekly or biweekly, so valuable information about aircraft operation or performance is thus historical and out-of-date when received.  01-20-2007.

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