How to Reconcile COTS Components and Tailored Future-Proof Data Acquisition System in Flight Test Instrumentation

Abstract

During decades, FTI (Flight Test Instrumentation) systems were based on home-made or build-to-spec designs to address the specificities of each test article and the habits of each instrumentation engineers. However, thanks to decades of standardization efforts, the flight test community progressively took benefits of the interoperability brought by the products and the instrumentation suppliers converted their offer into COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) product lines. Despite the obvious benefits of the COTS approach (lead time, maturity, cost, maintenance, etc.), the focus on the mainstream needs have marginalized some features that brought a lot of value to some instrumentation engineers who now usually must complete their instrumentation system with custom items to meet their former expectations. The aim of this paper is to present how FTI system based on COTS components can be tailored to embrace the uniqueness of each program and ensure future-proof capabilities, through modules that allow hardware and software customizations with a seamless integration into Safran Data Systems COTS solution ecosystem.