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In the last year or so there was an article in Sport Aviation about someone who had built a rig that could be strapped to the wing of an aircraft for gathering flight test data. Airspeed, AOA, yaw, etc. It was a one or two page article, the rig was bright orange and I think the inventor was in California. Does anyone remember the name or company name or which issue this was in?
Thank you
I don't know about the article, but there are a couple of them out there that are more permanent.
https://www.aerospaceonline.com/doc/...-recorder-0001
If you're looking for a little less fidelity and can suss things out, there are a host of apps that can do the heavy lifting of data recording. I'm using CloudAhoy for my little Nieuport, as I can't be bothered with actual data collection while flying - I'm just not that good at piloting an aircraft to fly a profile and write stuff down with any amount of accuracy.
It does airspeed, including factoring in winds as reported for Ground Speed, TAS and IAS (which is pretty cool), climb rates, pitch angles (both horizontal and vertical), and in playback gives a host of options, including a glass panel representation of the flight over 3D Google maps. Yaw has to be sussed out by watching this, and there is a heading vs. course function. It can tell one pitch, but that may or may not relate to AOA for the purposes of flight testing.
It can be very eye opening. While I can enter slow flight and do 360 turns or perform ground reference maneuvers without dropping or climbing 100 feet, I am not nearly as rock solid as I thought I was. And the sweet spot for best climbs are very specific in my little aircraft.
That was in Beth Stanton's "Innovations" column in the July issue.
The company is Spingarage. Here's a direct link to the story.
Yep that's it. Thank you so much.