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Configuration Management for F/A-18 Flight Test
To support flight test of F/A-18
C/D Hornet aircraft ordered by the Swiss Military
Department, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace purchased
a System 500 Model 550-based ground station.
The 550 was the ground station of choice because
of its extensive use for similar applications and
because of the depth of support that comes with
the system.
The Model 550 for this effort was
configured with eight high-performance Compac/DEC
Alpha® workstations via an FDDI link for real-time
data display, plus a 9 GB disk for high-speed data
archival and retrieval coupled with a DEC Alpha
file server. The 550 chassis is part of a
seven-rack configuration that includes such existing
flight test equipment as tape drives, data monitors,
decoders, and strip chart recorders.
Unlike conventional flight test
ground station configurations, this 550-based solution
was integrated with Oracle, a commercial-off-the-shelf
relational database management system. Oracle
compatibility, in conjunction with the 550’s
implementation of the IRIG 106 Chapter 9 Telemetry
Attributes Transfer Standard (TMATS) for seamless
database transfer, allows Swiss engineers to configure
both the flight test program’s ground station
and airborne data acquisition instrumentation from
just one commercial-off-the-shelf system.
Aircraft instrumentation systems can therefore be
easily programmed before each test at a fraction
of previous costs. Since the Model 550 was
delivered to Switzerland along with the F/A-18s,
the Swiss can perform their own flight test exercises
of aircraft avionics modifications and aircraft
configuration changes over the aircraft’s lifetime.
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Flight Test Applications
- Programming aircraft data
acquisition systems
- Preflight checkout
- Real-time acquisition
- Safety of flight
- Post-flight analysis
- Data reduction
- Data archival
- Simulation and training
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Features / Benefits
- Distributed open architecture
with plug-and-play hardware and software modules
- IRIG PCM decommutation to 20
Mbps
- Acquire and merge multiple sources:
PCM, IRIG time, MIL-STD-1553 (including IRIG 106
Chapter 8), serial, analog, digital, LAN
- Numerous real-time data storage,
archival, and replay options
- Parallel real-time processing
with over 150 algorithms in C for data compression
and conversion
- Easy-to-use environment for developing
custom algorithms, real-time displays, or databases
- Application Programming Interface
(Windows NT™ or UNIX®) provides real-time
data to your application or the means to set up
and control your front end
- Batch post-processing, frame-oriented
processing, and historical RDBMS
- Telemetry Attributes Transfer
Standard (TMATS) compatible (IRIG 106 Chapter
9)
- Integrate off-the-shelf VME modules
for your unique flight test requirements
- Proven COTS product with ongoing
product development
- Complete range of Customer Support
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OTHER APPLICATIONS:
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