Welcome to Aerobatic Data Logger blog

Welcome to my new blog to record and preset my adventure towards developing a flight data recorder for the purpose of recording and analyzing an Aerobatic flight.

Background:
First of all, for those not familiar with the sport of Competition Aerobatics, I have been a member of IAC and a participant in the sport since 1983.

You can find much more information on the sport at the IAC.ORG web site.

One of the challenges in our sport is to be able to practice the aerobatic sequences and to get meaningful feedback regarding the precision of the flying and to improve the quality of the flying to impress the judges.

There are basically 4 ways to get feedback from practice flying:

1. Have a friend, who is a knowledgeable judge, to critique your flying and prove feedback.
   In some cases, this is awesome if the person doing the critiquing is an experienced coach.
   There are even a number of professional coaches that travel the country hosting what are called Camps.
2. Mount cameras (such as Gopro, or 360Fly) around the plane and video the flight.
   These are interesting to watch, and do provide some feedback, but they do not give the whole picture. 
3. Have someone video your flying from the ground.
   Essentially this is the same as having a friend judge your flight, but with you being able to see it as well.   
   This is always a challenge because the planes are so high and pretty far away.
   Typically the video is either zoomed too far away to be able to see the plane, or is zoomed too close and looses the perspective of the overall flight.  The recording is also usually shaky and hard to watch due to poor tracking of the planes path.
   This is an ongoing work in progress and many people have suggested various solutions.
4. The final option is to record the flight using some sort of data recorder, such as a GPS, or video camera that contain GPS, Acceleration, and Altitude information.

This blog will explore what I have learned and the options that I have tested to this end.
If you have any questions of comments, please feel free to contact me.