Automated Flight Data Management System(AFDMS) for Aircraft System Identification

For a high performance fighter aircraft, extensive flight testing is required to be carried out for flight envelope expansion and certification. The gathered flight data is used for a variety of tasks, such as, air data calibration, performance analysis, handling qualities evaluation, model identification, aero database update and so on. The flight data management task becomes even more arduous in view of the large number of flight conditions, maneuvers and store configurations to be test flown. On top of that, flight testing is carried out with a number of prototypes, which adds to the complexity. Flight data received from different sources need to be time synchronized and processed for maneuver extraction. It therefore becomes necessary to arrange and streamline the vast amount of flight test data in a suitable format that would enable the analyst to retrieve the data according to his requirements. A quick and easy access to flight data, to extract relevant information for the task at hand, is therefore highly desirable. All this can be achieved only through a well designed Automated Flight Data Management System (AFDMS).