Kent Stange

Distributed Flight Control System with Automatic Transient Disturbance Recovery

Systems incorporating digital electronic technology are used to implement aircraft functions that can affect the safe operation of the aircraft. Intense electromagnetic environments (such as lightning and EMP) can be a common cause threat to such digital systems, causing both hard (damage) and soft (digital upset) faults in digital electronics. Traditionally, redundancy has been used to avoid single point failures (hard or soft faults) that could cause loss of an aircraft function affecting safe flight and landing. Relative to soft faults, “rapid” fault clearing has been implemented and evaluated to achieve system soft fault robustness.

Summarization of Neutron Test Results on a Recoverable Computer System

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the results of a Single Event Effects (SEE) test conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory in February 2004. The experimental results are related to actual flight and interpreted in terms of probability of SEE per flight hour. The purpose of these statistics is to evaluate the threat of SEE to flight critical avionics systems employing a rollback recovery scheme.

Honeywell FLASH fiber optic motherboard evaluations

The use of fiber optic data transmission media can make significant contributions in achieving increasing performance and reduced life cycle cost requirements placed on commercial and military transport aircraft. For complete end-to-end fiber optic transmission, photonics technologies and techniques need to be understood and applied internally to the aircraft line replaceable units as well as externally on the interconnecting aircraft cable plant. During a portion of the Honeywell contribution to Task 2A on the Fly- by-Light Advanced System Hardware program, evaluations were done on a fiber optic transmission media implementation internal to a Primary Flight Control Computer (PFCC). The PFCC internal fiber optic transmission media implementation included a fiber optic backplane, an optical card-edge connector, and an optical source/detector coupler/installation. The performance of these optical media components were evaluated over typical aircraft environmental stresses of temperature, vibration, and humidity. These optical media components represent key technologies to the computer end-to-end fiber optic transmission capability on commercial and military transport aircraft. The evaluations and technical readiness assessments of these technologies will enable better perspectives on productization of fly-by-light systems requiring their utilizations.