A RELATIONAL APPROACH FOR MANAGING LARGE FLIGHT TEST PARAMETER LISTS

Abstract

The number of aircraft parameters used in flight-testing has constantly increased over the years and there is no sign that situation will change in the near future. On the contrary, in modern, software-driven, digital avionic systems, all sorts of parameters circulate through digital buses and can be transferred to on-board data acquisition systems more easily than those converted from traditional analog transducers, facilitating the request for more and more parameters to be acquired, processed, visualized, stored and retrieved at any given time. The constant unbalance between what parameter quantity engineers believe to be “sufficient” for developing and troubleshooting systems in a new aircraft, which tends to grow with aircraft complexity, and the associated cost of instrumenting a test prototype accordingly, which tends to grow beyond budget limits, pushes for new creative ways of handling both tendencies without compromising the ease of performing an engineering analysis directly from flight test data. This paper presents an alternative for handling large collections of flight test parameters through a relational approach, particularly in two important scenarios: the very basic creation and administration of the traditional “Flight Test Parameter List” and the transmission of selected data over a telemetry link for visualization in a Ground Station.