Flight Operations

The Flight Operations section is responsible for the final construction and mission management of the Monash UAS' aircrafts. The team is involved in flight testing, integration and wiring of aerostructures and avionics components into the functional aircrafts, as well as the design of ground station equipment, procedures and piloting.

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Responsibilities

Flight Days

While Flight Operations has a range of technical projects, we also have a huge amount of responsibility in organising flight testing, which includes running the days themselves as well as coordinating & conducting Pre Flight-Day Safety Checks (PFSCs) in the week leading up to a flight day. Every member of Flight Operations contributes to this process in addition to their project work.

Ground Station

During flight tests, the ground station team monitors all systems on the aircraft through telemetry, interpreting the information and relaying it to pilots. Afterwards, analysis of the flight logs is conducted to extract critical metrics and information in order to better guide future developments. Currently, our ground station setup is being overhauled to be condensed to two redundant systems that can be deployed in seconds, each carryable in just a single hand.

Flight Analysis

Using a combination of dedicated in-flight tuning test platforms like the Fyrefly, manual stability analysis & simulation software, our Flight Analysis projects works to hone our ability to order the chaos of multi-rotors in any environment. These skills are vital to ensure the safe, stable & efficient flight of larger complex aircraft, especially when implementing autopilot procedures.

Fyrefly

The Fyrefly is an intentionally unstable tricopter to allow us to practice difficult tuning operations in a low-stakes environment.

Mosquito

The Mosquito is a small and simple aircraft that mimics the avionics setup of our larger aircraft to help us test experimental autopilot procedures.

Pilots

The piloting team is responsible for the manual control of aircrafts and awareness of all systems on-board. Pilots are continuously communicating performance information to the development teams and are in charge of supervising all autonomous flights, always ready to take control in case of malfunction.

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The team that keeps everything running.

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Flight Operations