WINGS CONCEPT: PRESENT AND FUTURE

Abstract

The Western Aeronautical Test Range (WATR) of NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) is facing a challenge in meeting the technology demands of future flight mission projects. Rapid growth in technology for aircraft has resulted in complexity often surpassing the capabilities of the current WATR real-time processing and display systems. These current legacy systems are based on an architecture that is over a decade old. In response, the WATR has initiated the development of the WATR Integrated Next Generation System (WINGS). The purpose of WINGS is to provide the capability to acquire data from a variety of sources and process that data for subsequent analysis and display to Project Users in the WATR Mission Control Centers (MCCs) in real-time, near real-time and subsequent post-mission analysis. WINGS system architecture will bridge the continuing gap between new research flight test requirements and capability by distributing current system architectures to provide incremental and iterative system upgrades.