A flight test organization was tasked with instrumenting a new regional airliner to gather flight test data. This jet was a flagship project that holds a great deal of significance for the organization in terms of competing on the world stage. Not unlike any major aircraft development, it needed to complete testing smoothly which meant the Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) needed to provide quality data reliably.
New aircraft often utilize new avionics busses and this means new data acquisition hardware can be necessary to capture the relevant data. In this case, the FTI had to capture data from two new busses – the ARINC 664 pt7 and Intermodule Data Bus (IDB). These had never been fitted to an aircraft the organization had tested before. As the ARINC 664 pt7 bus used proprietary packets, there was no off-the-shelf data acquisition solution available, a similar issue for the IDB.
There was a significant amount of data that needed to be gathered and therefore a large data acquisition system was required. The challenge was to install and operate a large distributed network of Data Acquisition Units (DAU) that could capture all this data coherently and synchronously.
The FTI system with hot bench integration was completed smoothly and on time. There were no significant issues from design to delivery to system test. This ensured that the data collection equipment did not delay the flight test project. The large data acquisition system also successfully delivered a large quantity of data. Its pedigree of reliability should also ensure the successful collection of quality data.
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