3 Day Open Conference

Review of a Successful Distributed Networked and Modular FTI Implementation
Wednesday 19th November 2008
11.30 - 12.00
Auditorium 3

Recent years have seen a growth in interest and application of commercial networks to flight test. In particular, there has been a drive to replace proprietary or specialized busses in distributed flight test instrumentation (FTI) systems with Ethernet. This paper looks at a particular test program using an Ethernet based FTI installation.

The first A330 MRTT prototype completed Phase 1 of flight testing devoted to civil certification in Q1 2008. The FTI system consisted of thirteen Ethernet nodes distributed around the airframe. Each Ethernet node was dedicated to data acquisition, including avionic bus monitoring, various analog and digital parameters with system wide sampling synchronized by GPS. The certification took place over 3 months with the FTI system logging up a total of 63 flights and 202 flight hours. During this time, not a single flight had been delayed or cancelled due to a technical failure.

This paper describes the architecture of the FTI system used. The advantages of using a distributed networked and modular approach for a flight test instrumentation is discussed, in comparison with how the testing would have been carried out with a more traditional FTI bus. It proposes that the networked implementation contributed to the rapid and successful certification of the A330 MRTT phase 1.

About the Speaker(s):

David Doyle, Ruben Canizares and Ty Clark
ACRA CONTROL Ltd.