FLEXIBLE FLIGHT TESTING DATA ACQUISITION AND REAL-TIME PROCESSING SYSTEM FOR THE A109E POWER

A flight test data acquisition system has been developed to conduct Supplemental Type Certificate validation on the A109E Power helicopter. The system has been designed to be quickly installed and removed. It minimizes the impact on the aircraft by utilizing existing airframe sensors as well as standalone instruments for inertial and navigation data. Near-real time processing, recording and display of the acquired data are obtained on a standard laptop. LabView is the programming language used to allow multiple threads associated with each sensor to run simultaneously. A dynamic load balancing algorithm insures that the acquisition buffers sustain the desired variable sampling rates and minimizes the load on the laptop processor. Experimental results of the response of the system to different perturbations are presented.