INTERACTIVE ANALYSIS AND DISPLAY SYSTEM (IADS) TO SUPPORT LOADS/FLUTTER TESTING

Abstract

The Interactive Analysis and Display System (IADS) provides the structures flight test engineer with enhanced test-data processing, management and display capabilities necessary to perform safety critical aircraft analysis in near real-time during a flight test mission. The IADS provides enhanced situational awareness through an analysis and display capability designed to increase the confidence of the engineer in making clearance decisions within the Mission control Room (MCR) environment. The engineer achieves this confidence level through IADS’ real-time display capability and simultaneous near real-time processing capability consisting of both time domain and frequency domain analyses. The system displays real-time data while performing interactive and automated near real-time analyses; alerting the engineer when displayed parameters exceed predefined threshold limits. Real-time data and results created in near real-time may be compared to previous flight test data to enhance the user’s confidence in making point-to-point clearance decisions. The IADS provides a post flight capability at the engineer’s project area desktop, with a user interface common with the real-time system. The post flight IADS provides all of the capabilities of the real-time IADS with additional data access and data organization, allowing the engineer to perform structural analysis with test data from the each flight and compile summary plots and tables over the most of the test program. The IADS promotes teamwork by allowing the engineers to share data and test results during a mission and in the post flight environment. This paper discusses the system overview and capabilities of the IADS.