Abstract

As the requirements of a modern air vehicle changes during development and use, requirements and design of test and recording functions have to be continuously updated. To achieve control over functional monitoring, pilot warnings and health management in a tightly integrated avionics system with several configuration variants and frequent updates, powerful tools are needed, especially when requirements on cost reduction and a small staff are considered. Traditionally the work has been divided among several departments, with own processes and tools, leading to redundant work and inconsistency, despite tremendous inspection efforts.

This paper describes how the workflow to define pilot warnings are integrated in order to reduce development time and reuse data. There are over 500 failure modes defined for the Gripen Aircraft.
The impact of a failure is depending on equipment configuration and thus will the required pilot actions differ between the variants. In complex failure situations it is also important to find the primary fault and filter faults that can be considered as consequences of the primary fault. The presentation will show how primary failures are distinguished from secondaries or consequences.

Experience has shown that the recommended pilot actions often need to be revised after that operational experience has been achieved by the users. As changes in a delivered product are costly, the method of separately loadable databases for flight manuals and warnings information will significantly reduce the cost of an update and also enable an incremental development. This paper will also describe how field loadable databases can be used in aircraft.