The paper will start with a short introduction to the structure of the Airbus Group, before addressing the Airbus Defence and Space business line Military Aircraft.
The Rig Operation department for airborne solutions within this organisation is responsible for the development, design, operation and support of ground test facilities and test support systems, which are used for design validation and verification of civil and military air systems.
The main part of this document will start with a typical sequence of tests in our Test Centre.
The presentation will then focus on some advanced methods used during the qualification of test equipment and to improve the efficiency of ground test facilities in terms of cost, time and risk reduction. The next topic is tool-based rig management and control, beginning with test preparation and test shift planning and also covering aspects of configuration control, automatisation of test facilities and support of the test report. Overall certification aspects and software tool qualification aspects that are mandatory elements in this process chain will close the abstract.
The successful conversion of these concepts will be demonstrated by an example: The German System Support Centre (SUZ, System Unterstützungszentrum). The SUZ provides support capabilities for the full range of Tornado and Eurofighter's (Typhoon) needs concerning cooperation and the common use of ground test facilities with the German Air Force from the national customer side and Airbus Defence and Space from the engineering and industry side.