Accident Analysis - Single Point Failure

[Meatservo]

I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the retinue of solid-state parts in a smart-phone that will mimic the actions of a gyroscope. I think it's influenced by the same forces as your inner ear. I would be very surprised to find out that thing was any use at all, but I've been wrong before.

It was this exact scenario that finally caused me many years ago to lose my patience with the DHC-3 operator I worked for, who were very pushy about flying in poor visibility and ceilings. Like many young folk I tried to live up to their expectations until I had a flight very much like the one in the video. Obviously I had a happier outcome, but I was terrified and it changed my outlook. I remember noticing some time after the fact that one of the Otters (thankfully not the one I was in at the time) even had a vaccum-driven turn&bank indicator- driven from the same pump as the rest of the instruments!

Suffice to say I became significantly and permanently more hard-nosed about poor weather and VFR-only machines after that. The thing about one-mile visibility is that at any time, you can be a mile from ZERO visibility and not even see it coming.

[photofly]

I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the retinue of solid-state parts in a smart-phone that will mimic the actions of a gyroscope.

As a matter of fact, in a smartphone there is everything you need to mimic a rotating gyroscope. You have exactly the same kind of solid state MEMS gyro, accelerometer and magnetometer chip and GPS as is in things like the Garmin G5, and G1000. What you don’t have in a cellphone is an oven to stabilize the temperature, and hardware and firmware devoted to the task of maintaining an attitude solution accurate enough for flight. And the phone operating system doesn’t give you the access to the data you need. the tricky part Is keeping a stable reference over a duration of minutes without using the gravity vector. Aircraft are about the only systems where the gravity vector points other than down for periods of minutes at a time so it’s not a big disadvantage for most purposes.

I latterly used a single chip from Bosch that outputs a full attitude solution, connected to an Arduino, for my three axis position recorder; the chip had a built in micro controller doing the math, and it did a very good job. I’d previously used the arduino to develop my own AHRS, but I couldn’t temperature stabilize it and it had a tendency to topple when it got warm.

[digits_]

4. Did anyone have a smart phone with an AI app on it. In that location, they could probably downloaded one while they transited North.

Just out of interest, I don't think this is a possibility: you actually have to have a specially designed ARS or AHRS to feed data to your phone to display. The hardware in the phone isn't sufficient, so having just an app won't work.

I have seen some AI-like apps, but as far as I know they all work like the ball (or a weight on a string) and so aren't any use for instrument flying.

The older ones were simulated just based on GPS position, which was nice to see but completely useless. Interesting solution though to the early problems those programmers faced: not having accurate sensors, so getting the data from a completely different system.