Flight Test Engineer Station for A350 aircraft

Yves Marcet (FTES Project Leader), Flight and Integration Tests Centre – AIRBUS Operation SAS, Toulouse, France

Abstract

On Airbus development aircraft, the Flight Test Engineers (FTE) are in charge of the flight test program. During the flights, they are leading the test sequences in order to validate the different checkpoints. The onboard Flight Test Engineer Station (FTES) is designed to help them in this mission.

This system participates to the aircraft safety and gives access in real time to the aircraft pa-rameters (more than 300.000 parameters planned on A350). It allows the control and the monitoring of flight test specific equipment (such as data recorders, video system, water bal-last...) and computes the functional status of the whole flight test installation.

Regardless of the amount of information to display, the graphical user interface should be “user friendly” and “easy to use” enough to allow engineers to focus on testing. The station is based on an enhanced multi-screen display system and on a tablet PC interface for some specific controls.

Despite its complexity, the FTES must provide all these services with a high level of reliabili-ty.

Over the years, Airbus has developed a strong experience on this kind of system; this paper gives an overview of the A350 version.