Richard Hess

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.