Some people may be interested in how FlySeer™ came to be, it’s a long story…
My name is Don Muehlbauer. I have been flying since 1992, am a CFI and CFII, and fortunate to have been awarded both the FAA Gold Seal Instructor designation as well as AOPA Distinguished Award winner CFI through the AOPA Flight Training Experience Survey of my clients.
But that’s not where this all started. I’ve been a tinkerer all my life. I’ve started and sold a few businesses and if you google me on the patent site here, you’ll see I have inventions and patents in diverse areas from web search technology (a previous business) to electric bikes (a hobby of mine) to flavor extraction from plants (a business of mine).
What started FlySeer™ was that I bought a Beech A36. I’d previously owned other aircraft, both a Piper Cherokee 6 and a Glastar, but the A36 was the first retractable gear aircraft I owned. If you’re familiar with the pre-1984 A36’s, they have a central control yoke column, with a big ox-yoke looking bar to each side for the pilot and co-pilot controls. That ox-yoke makes it impossible to see the gear indicator without significantly moving your head, something you really don’t want to do while lowering the gear close to the ground on an instrument approach. You can see it in the red circle in the panel picture below.
In reviewing my options and looking at what others had done, I decided I could do better. I didn’t want a second set of lights, and the STC’d options were expensive, and obtrusive systems like the factory option on the Piper Arrow were more often than not disabled on client aircraft I’d flown. I was looking for something that would be very inexpensive, wouldn’t be annoying to the pilot, and yet would work much better than available options.
Then came the “Aha moment” for FlySeer. I could combine the existing data from aircraft instruments, systems and alerts with a separate, stand-alone system to collect that information, as well as information from outside the aircraft, and centrally manage a set of rules and alerts with MUCH richer information, to make alerts work MUCH better.
My son Matt, a very talented engineer, was able to build a working prototype over a couple of weekends, that we then tested in the A36. As the initial example for the gear retraction case in the A36, we wanted to get an alert to check the gear only when we were SURE the plane was landing, so we configured as follows:
RULES
- AGL < 1200′, if you’re not near the ground, you’re not landing
- Vertical Speed < -200’/min, if you’re not descending, you’re not landing
- Airspeed < 120 kts, if you’re not going slow, you’re not landing
- Gear Position to be monitored in a later prototype
ALERT
- Our Alert was a “Check Gear Position” recording by Matt’s wife Theresa
NOTE: Unlike factory options, this set of Rules does not need to be adjusted when the pilot is practicing stalls at altitude, and the Alert is altitude specific. Also, the Rules can be changed by the pilot, to adjust to their aircraft, and their personal desires.
For more examples, please see the Sample Functionality page.
Our second big “Aha moment” came when we considered not only safety needs, but training needs. CFIs and their clients are often really busy learning, training, watching and correcting what the client is doing, and those distractions can result in unsafe conditions, including traffic monitoring. So FlySeer quickly became a way to reduce CFI workload and, enable faster, more consistent flight student learning, and increase safety.
FlySeer currently has 2 patents pending for portions of FlySeer technology.