Aerospace engineering graduate student Alek Gavrilovski has been recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with a PEGASAS Outstanding Student Researcher Award.

Announcement of the honor came on June 4, during the annual meeting of the PEGASAS Center of Excellence for General Aviation -- a national gathering of  industry, government, and academic partners in general aviation, held at Georgia Tech June 3-5. Find out moreabout this meeting.

The award recognizes the stature of Gavrilovski's overall scholarship, including his most recent project, Rotorcraft ASIAS (Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing), which is seeking to improve the safety record of helicopters.

"While the overall safety record in aviation has improved a lot over time, the safety of rotorcraft vehicles is still order-of-magnitude much worse than with commercial aviation," he said.

"So the idea [with ASIAS) was to use flight data monitoring (FDM), which is already used in commercial airlines, to improve the safety of rotorcraft flight."

Gavrilovski plans to create a unified data-sharing network to enable directed safety studies of rotorcraft data. As a part of this work, he will identify the events, parameters, rates and exceedences that are currently recorded using existing equipment. Along with an exhaustive literature search, his goal is to create and continually improve a rotorcraft-specific FDM system.

"Because we will be looking at actual flight data -- information that could identify a particular pilot -- we had to run our entire plan though the Institutional Review Board (IRB), which was something new for me," he said.

"But it looks like we are cleared to begin."

Gavrilovski plans to pursue the Rotorcraft ASIAS project as a part of his doctoral work at Georgia Tech's Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) where he works under the mentorship of Dr. Dimitri Mavris and Dr. Hernando Jimenez. A native of Macedonia, Gavrilovski earned his undergraduate and masters degrees at Georgia Tech's School of Aerospace Engineering.

Dennis Filler, Director of the FAA Technical Center