Successfully Instrumenting a Regional Jet for Flight Testing with a New Team

A major aircraft manufacturer needed to plan and operate a flight test campaign for a new regional airliner. The organization did not have an in-house capability to do this and instead typically outsourced this to a dedicated flight test provider. The organization decided it wanted to build up a flight test capability in-house and thus embarked on a project to split the flight test campaign into two groups – the first being the traditional flight test provider, the second the new in-house team.

The challenge they faced was they wanted their in-house team to be homegrown, rather than buying in talent. This meant that there would be no large pool of flight test experience for the team to draw on. This also resulted in a further issue - the lack of in-house system engineering skillsets to define the instrumentation system itself. A large data acquisition system was required and thus it was important that the chosen system was well proven and relatively simple to install, manage and use in the field.

The short-term result of the project was that a flight test instrumentation system was successfully selected, tested, installed and working for the flight test application. The project goals were met without any significant issues and data is being gathered that will help the aircraft gain certification. Read all about the solution Curtiss-Wright developed for the company and the results achieved in our case study.

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