Continuous Technology Refreshment -A Solution For Addressing Obsolescence, Extending The Life Cycle And Reducing Sustainment Costs Of Aging Rotorcraft Avionic Systems

For air crew and maintenance personnel, successful aircraft employment requires avionics that are reliable and available. With few exceptions, older aircraft contain older avionics systems which over time become increasingly unreliable and unmaintainable due to their obsolescence. As aircraft age, maintenance costs increase as replacement or reconditioned parts for critical system components become economically or practically unavailable. This availability problem is routinely experienced in the US military, whose aircraft fleet has an average age in excess of 25 years. Reliability and maintainability (R&M) problems lead to high cost of ownership, a cost which eventually increases to an unacceptable level. Modernizing older avionics systems requires identifying the problematic system components (in this discussion, Line Replaceable Units [LRUs] and Shop Replaceable Units [SRUs]), functionally reverse engineering the components, and then deploying the re-engineered components. Reverse engineering a component is typically required, since complete technical data is rarely available. Battelle has modernized several legacy components by applying the reverse engineering / re-engineering model described in this paper. Re-engineering increases component reliability and availability, which in turn increases aircraft reliability and availability, and also results in lower cost of ownership. As an example of addressing failure and poor maintainability of an avionics component, this model is applied to the reverse engineering and re-engineering of an A-10C Upgraded Data Transfer Unit (UDTU). Modernization by form-fit-function replacement components can be a major tool in resolving the obsolescence, poor reliability, and rising life cycle cost problems plaguing our current rotorcraft avionics systems.