Additional Certification for ALERTS

Appareo Systems has received an additional Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) for the ALERTS Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) system. Transport Canada has granted the STC for the Eurocopter AS350 and has granted earlier STC’s for Bell 206 and 407 aircraft. ALERTS has previously been granted STCs for the same aircraft types in the U.S. by the FAA. ALERTS – Aircraft Logging and Event Recording for Training and Safety – is a comprehensive FOQA and Flight Data Management (FDM) system designed for light and legacy aircraft where more traditional flight data recorders are too large and costly to be viable choices. As a comprehensive system, ALERTS makes an effective FOQA/FDM program available to operators of any size. The STC is a document that is granted by Transport Canada when the applicant has received approval to modify an aircraft from its original design. The STC applies to the airborne portion of the ALERTS System, the GAU 2000. The GAU 2000 is a lightweight unit that gathers flight data with an integrated GPS and a sophisticated inertial sensing suite. Requiring only aircraft power and ground and weighing roughly two pounds, the GAU 2000 can be mounted in nearly any type of aircraft. The gathered flight data is recorded to an SD memory card and an internal crash hardened memory and is later transferred to the software portion of ALERTS, which automatically analyzes the data for any events that are outside of standard operating procedures. These events are then forwarded to the system administrator for further action. Additionally, all recorded flight data is stored in a database that can generate detailed reports on any aspect of the fleet’s performance, further improving safety, pilot training and efficiency.