Marinvent Device Intended To Prevent Icing Accidents

No aircraft in service today is equipped with a system to monitor the performance and safety margin of its airfoils under icing conditions... and that's a situation Canadian aerospace firm Marinvent hopes to change.

Marinvent tells Aero-News its Aerodynamic Performance Monitor (APM) is "the only system that can provide the crew with usable information to safely fly the aircraft in icing conditions." The company adds the APM also protects against tailplane stalls, and can warn the crew early during the takeoff, if the wing performance has been compromised by ice.

Conventional stall warnings do not function on either of those environments, Marinvent notes, and this has led to a number of high profile aircraft accidents.

APM employs wing and tail-mounted sensors that monitor the state of the airflow over those locations. Competing technologies use angle-of-attack sensors that are typically fuselage mounted, and have no direct indication of the aerodynamic conditions over lifting surfaces.

Marinvent says icing detectors also do little to help the crew fly the aircraft in icing conditions, and many aircraft have been lost despite the their crews’ obviously being aware of the existence of icing conditions, as was the case in the 1994 American Eagle accident at Roselawn, IN.

APM addresses two other critical conditions for which there is currently no protection provided by traditional systems: tailplane stalls, and wing contamination during takeoff. Tailplane stalls are insidious and dangerous, because they typically cause a violent loss of control with little or no warning. Even worse, recovery from a tailplane stall requires completely differing techniques from a traditional stall recovery, and the outcome of an inappropriate recovery is catastrophic in most cases.

Attempted takeoffs with ice-contaminated wings have resulted in numerous accidents, including the loss of Air Florida Flight 90 in 1982, the Air Ontario Dryden disaster of 1989, and the US Air crash in New York harbor in 1992.

The APM project was partially funded by a NASA SBIR grant, and has since been extensively tested on numerous aircraft types and in special icing wind-tunnels. Marinvent says its system is ready for certification and deployment on all categories of general aviation and transport aircraft.

FMI: www.marinvent.com