Boeing Flight Test Planning and Procedures

• Main Author: Eccles, Lee H.
• Other Authors: Boeing Commercial Airplane Group
• Language: en_US
• Published: International Foundation for Telemetering 1992
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/611939; http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/611939

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California === The Boeing Commercial Airplane Group uses a highly computerized Flight Test system. Everything from test planning to equipment control is handled through a large mainframe computer. This paper is an introduction to the structures which are necessary to efficiently run tests on many different airplanes at the same time, with a wide range of test requirements. This paper discusses the data bases required, the test planning and the procedures used to run a flight test program. Some data bases are common to all test programs while others are specific to a particular test program. The test planning begins with the Instrumentation Requirements estimating process. Then comes selecting parameters from the common data bases and marking them as required for a particular test program. New parameters are added to the common data bases as required. Once the process of identifying parameters to be recorded is started, the computer automatically generates airplane specific data bases and loads the information from the common data bases into them so that the other groups can select the specific instrumentation to be used to measure each parameter. As this planning is accomplished, information is added to the data bases so that they become more complete as the actual testing approaches, When the airplane enters it's testing phase, the data from these data bases is retrieved and provided to both the on-board data monitor system and the ground station to allow data to be acquired from the data acquisition system or from tape for data processing. As the testing is accomplished the computer data is updated to indicate the progress of the testing.