Levil Aviation has been building this little BOM (Broadcasting Outer Module) for a year now, and we think it is high time that we at Kitplanes should give it a try – so we picked up this little unit at the Levil booth, and are planning to mount it on an airplane the first chance we get – look for a review in the magazine in the near future!
The BOM (which looks surprisingly like what it sounds like) is designed to mount to the underside of a wing, and is essentially a Stan-alone ADAHRS that connects, via WiFi, to a tablet computer in the cockpit. Powered by its own little turbine wheel (so not only is it a BOM, it is also a RAT), the unit sends airspeed, attitude, AoA, and attitude information to the cockpit, where it can be displayed and recorded. Oh yeah – it also has a GPS, so all of this data can be correlated to location and time in flight.
Designed to work as a standalone instrument panel for very light, simple aircraft, it should also serve as a collector for flight test information when you don’t already know the accuracy of a new aircraft’s pitot/static system. We hope that after evaluation, we can use the device when reporting on new aircraft, letting it serve as an independent instrumentation package, giving accurate data regardless of the test aircraft’s avionics package.
We’ll give it a try on some known aircraft, and let you know our impressions.
More info: levilaviation.com/thebom
