Flight Condition Recognition (FCR) Technique

There is an ever increasing emphasis throughout the Department of Defense (DOD) on reducing costs and improving the effectiveness of military equipment. Constraints on military budgets, coupled with inflation and mounting operation and support costs, are prompting a search for positive methods of cost reduction in the acquisition and life cycle of all vehicles and equipment. The traditional effort has been a "comprehensive" reliability-improvement program involving parts' screening, predictions, more stringent specifications, and rigorous demonstration and acceptance testing. These programs have resulted in some cost savings. However, additional savings are possible by replacing some of the high value fatigue critical components based on their usage. The Structural Integrity Recording System (SIRS) is being developed to permit monitoring the usage spectrum of each helicopter. Knowledge of the usage spectrum permits recalculation of the fatigue lives of selected high value fatigue critical components. Replacements can be scheduled on a more realistic basic than simply using flight hours across the board for all helicopters regardless of the severity of operator usage.