Conduct of Flight Tests and On-Board Computing for the A380

Denis Lafourcade, AIRBUS Head of Data Processing – Systems and Integration Tests Centre, Toulouse, France

Abstract

The Airbus way of management of the flight tests activity limits the flight test crew to two pilots, one flight engineer and one (or two) flight test engineer (FTE). The latter is in charge of the flight test program and has to conduct the tests sequences during the flight, in order to validate them, on both qualitative and quantitative aspects. To perform theses tasks, a dedicated station is installed on board the aircraft, first fitted with classical electro-mechanical instruments on Concorde or A300, then becoming entirely computer-oriented on the A380.

As a consequence of the reduced flight test crew, Airbus developed the telemetry techniques, allowing dynamic message adaptation to the test sequence, as well as deferred data transmission when the aircraft is outside the coverage area.

In order to minimize the flight test data reduction time, a dedicated set of computers has also been installed on board to execute automatically a lot of pre-processing tasks.

Since the first A300 up to the A380 and A400M, Airbus acquired a broad knowledge of on-board computing, using now standard computers hardware, software and network techniques to provide tests teams with powerful tools.