Making Flight Test Instrumentation Setup Easier

Abstract

Modern Flight Test Instrumentation systems are highly customizable and complex. This complexity has steadily increased as data acquisitions systems have grown larger, and more data has been collected on each test flight. While it is desirable for data acquisition systems to be very flexible, that flexibility makes configuring the data acquisition system harder for the end-user. Flight Test Instrumentation systems are also monitoring a larger variety of data source during a typical test flight. Many of these new data sources are digital buses where there are many possible messages that can be sampled. This leads to the desire to reconfigure the data acquisition system more often to accommodate the unique needs of each test flight. These factors contribute to making it more difficult to configure Flight Test Instrumentation systems. While complexity has increased, the flight test industry is facing challenges as experienced engineers retire. Thus, there is a strong need to make Flight Test Instrumentation setup easier. This paper explores how Curtiss-Wright approached this problem and made setting up a Flight Test Instrumentation system easier through improvements in our TTCWare setup software.