Flight Logs and Telemetry Data from an Automated Flight Test Accident Involving the SwitchMaster Distributed Electric Propulsion Research Demonstrator

This dataset contains the onboard flight logs and telemetry data associated with the accident analysed in the article “Safety Considerations for a Distributed Electric Propulsion Aircraft: Lessons Learnt from an Automated Flight Test Accident Involving a Research Demonstrator”. The event occurred during an automated flight-test mission performed with SwitchMaster, a Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP) research demonstrator developed at Politecnico di Milano. The accident occurred during a scheduled pitch-excitation manoeuvre conducted for aerodynamic model identification and resulted in a loss of control followed by ground impact. The uploaded files contain the recorded data used for the reconstruction and analysis of the event, including aircraft states, attitude and angular-rate information, control inputs, propulsion-related variables, navigation data, and mission timing, as available in the original flight logs. The dataset is released to support transparency, reproducibility, and further research concerning flight-test safety, accident investigation, system identification, and automated flight testing of Distributed Electric Propulsion aircraft. Users should refer to the associated journal article for details concerning the aircraft configuration, flight-test procedure, accident sequence, data interpretation, and limitations of the analysis.