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. Germane to hazardous, fast-paced flight test programs is a need for enhanced situational awareness in the Mission Control Room (MCR). The IADS provides an enhanced situational awareness by providing an analysis and display capability designed to enhance the confidence of the engineer in making clearance decisions within the MCR environment. The IADS will allow the engineer to achieve this confidence level by providing a real-time display capability along with a simultaneous near real-time processing capability consisting of both time domain and frequency domain analyses. The system provides for displaying real-time data while performing interactive and automated near real-time analyses. The system also alerts the engineer when displayed and non-displayed parameters exceed predefined threshold limits. Both real-time data and results created in near real-time may be compared to predicted data on workstations to enhance the user’s confidence in making point-to-point clearance decisions. The IADS also provides a post-flight capability at the engineers project area desktop. Having a user interface that is common with the real-time system, the post-flight IADS provides all of the capabilities of the real-time IADS plus additional data storage and data organization to allow the engineer to perform structural analysis with test data from the complete test program. This paper discusses the system overview and capabilities of the IADS.