At the National Research Council’s Flight Research Lab, a Carleton co-op student brought Canadian flight safety to new heights. This remarkable contribution has earned him the distinction of Carleton University’s Undergraduate Co-op Student of the Year.
The winner, third-year aerospace engineering student Bradley Jung, worked in the Flight Recorder Playback Centre – a Transport Canada accredited aircraft maintenance facility where flight recorder systems – or black boxes – are analyzed.
Jung developed a computer program that constructs a path estimate using the aircraft’s heading, attitude and wind data – this is called “dead reckoning.’’ This path is then used by engineers in the reconstruction of an aircraft accident. The user can pick the corresponding 3D aircraft and the entire scenario can be recreated using X-Plane or Google Earth.
In one incident, Jung’s supervisor Patrick Zdunich was using two different software packages on separate computers to reconcile a dead-reckoned path. After discussing the problem with his co-op student, Jung had the problem solved by the next day and the program revised to eliminate the iteration.
The newly revised program has already been used in two high-profile incidents, resulting in the Lab’s ability to deliver crash results and analyses quicker.
“Bradley was a truly exceptional co-op student – not just the top one per cent but the very best I’ve seen in the last five years,” said Zdunich.
Jung also worked on creating a Windows application that grabbed flight data from the black box to recreate the scenario in Google Earth or X-Plane.