AIDS: The CAA requirement and its experience

There is no general legal requirement in the UK for British civil aircraft to be fitted with an Airborne Integrated Data System. Although the Air Navigation Order requires all aircraft over 5700 kg maximum take-off weight with a Transport Category Certificate of Airworthiness to carry some form of crash recorder, this is not necessarily associated with an AIDS. However, in two areas AIDS have virtually been a requirement as part of the certification process. On Concorde the Anglo-French certification authorities produced a totally new set of airworthiness requirements to match the advanced and novel features of the aircraft. The several new and previously untried approaches to airworthiness, and the state-of-the-art of AIDS recording, caused the joint authorities specifically to require the analysis of in-service flight recorder data to validate certain certification assumptions. The Supersonic Transport Aircraft Requirements state ‘… it will be necessary … to gather, as far as possible, flight statistical data both before certification and in subsequent commercial operations. This information will be compared with the assumptions made for the application of the requirement (e.g. assumptions as regards system reliability, statistics of turbulence, etc).’