Advances in 3D design, simulation and validation tools are spurring aerospace efforts to improve the safety and reduce the time, costs, complexity, and staffing demands of certification projects. That work should help bring new and upgraded aircraft, improved systems, and components to market.
Several other factors are adding to the impetus of those efforts, according to industry leaders.
Digital transformation — including the broader adoption of digital engineering, model-based design, and virtual copies (or digital twins) of new products and operations — has become a priority for nearly every major aerospace and defense firm. While the pace of adoption varies, firms are lured by the prospect of such advanced capabilities helping add billions to annual earnings through greater enterprise efficiencies and increased sales.
“Companies can’t afford to have a big design change in the middle of their flight test program. It might add six, eight months of delay to their program and a lot of cost,” said Dale Tutt, Siemens Digital Industries Software’s vice president of industry strategy. His 30 years of engineering and program management experience at The Spaceship Company, Cessna, Bombardier and General Dynamics showed that “using simulations, using the digital twin to really prove out your systems before you get into flight test, has tremendous benefits,” he said.
Dale Tutt, Siemens Digital Industries Software
Uncertain economic and geopolitical conditions, combined with persistent supply chain problems, have companies seeking ways to streamline critical hardware and software pipelines while heading off problems before they disrupt operations.
Pascal Daloz, Dassault Systèmes
Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in 3D modeling, social collaboration, simulation, and information intelligence technologies and services, provides customers “a virtual experience platform.” Its customers’ business environment remains volatile,” deputy CEO and chief operating officer Pascal Daloz, said. “To increase agility and profitability,” clients are turning to the company “to enable real-time analysis of raw material and part substitutions, as well as the reshaping of value networks.”
COMAC deployed Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform for design at all of its major research centers. Dassault Systèmes image.
Like most industries across the globe, aerospace and defense firms feel compelled to reduce their environmental impact. They are adopting “greener” means of conducting their own activities and customers’ operations of their products. These sustainability efforts are “driving a reimagining of portfolios throughout manufacturing industries,” Daloz noted. “There is a race to innovate across all subsectors.”
One example is Rolls-Royce, which has committed to achieve net-zero carbon emissions from its own operations by 2030. It also aims to create propulsion and energy breakthroughs that help customers reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The company’s net-zero path is built on three pillars, according to its Engineering Group head of systems and software, Jonathan Cooper.
Those are the electrification of aviation, the development of small, modular nuclear reactors, and the construction of electrical microgrids. The latter are focused on generating and transmitting the power needed to charge electric aircraft.
“The electrification of aviation is what really is driving Rolls-Royce,” Cooper said. He added that those pillars will depend on precise, safety-critical control systems that Rolls-Royce is designing with the mathematical computing software tool set of MathWorks, a leading developer of such advanced capabilities.
A key consideration in modeling and simulation, particularly advanced capabilities, is the credibility of tools and processes and their data products. The test, explained Aeroelasticity Professor Guiseppe Quaranta at Milan, Italy’s Polytechnic Institute, is whether a project manager or regulator can say, “I am comfortable making the needed decision with this data.”
That was one lesson of two parallel efforts over the last several years. Both sought to lay the foundation for persuading U.S., European, and other airworthiness authorities that 3D design, modeling, and simulation capabilities have become reliable enough to replace many flight tests used to certify new and upgraded aircraft, systems and components. They were inspired by dramatic improvements since the late 1990s in the ability of numerical analysis methods — computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational structural dynamics (CSD), computational fluid mechanics (CFM), and flight simulation — to capture the physics of aircraft in flight. Those improvements were enabled in part by increases in computation power and speed, more efficient coding, and the expanded foundation of flight and wind tunnel test data against which to assess analytical results.
Proponents argued that these tools were used every day “to analyze, optimize and design every external surface of an aircraft” and their growing accuracy warranted broader use.
The first effort began in mid-2017. Representatives from Boeing, Airbus, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the German Aerospace Center (abbreviated DLR), and NASA began work to develop a “recommended practices” document to support use of advanced analyses as an acceptable means of complying with a new or modified aircraft’s flight-safety requirements.
They met monthly for about a year. A larger “community of interest” group, which included representatives of Embraer and several universities with aeronautical engineering departments — working under the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) — then took up completing the Certification by Analysis (CbA) document. The group identified six recommended practices for an applicant to accomplish when flight modelling is being developed, proposed, and used to reduce flight testing relative to established aircraft certification practices.
At about the same time in Europe, a group was formed to address the application of advanced analyses to the certification of helicopters and tiltrotors. Led by the Italian aerospace, defense, and security manufacturer Leonardo, this Rotorcraft Certification by Simulation (RoCS) project included EASA, Germany’s DLR, the Netherlands Aerospace Center (abbreviated NLR in Dutch), the U.K.’s Cranfield University and University of Liverpool, and Milan’s Polytechnic Institute (Politecnico di Milano in Italian). That institute served as coordinator of the project, which was funded by the European Union’s Clean Sky 2 program to speed the integration of technologies to reduce aircraft pollutant and noise emissions.
Siemens plans to use a digital thread linking mechanical, electronics, electrical engineering and software design and implementation. The objective is to span the product lifecycle, from early design and manufacturing to operations, maintenance, updates and end-of-life management.
The efforts were driven by several factors, according to participants and their documents.
– Certifications of new aircraft and of derivative models, for example, have relied almost exclusively on flight tests (particularly in demonstrating handling-qualities compliance). Certification by simulation was limited to some failure modes.
– Certifications were becoming more expensive and taking longer as the complexity of aircraft and their systems increased.
– Flight tests involve inherent safety risks, particularly when they address operations at the edges of the flight envelope or more severe failure scenarios.
– Flight tests by their nature involve the most knowledgeable and skilled pilots, maintainers, and operations personnel. They therefore are not representative of how aircraft may perform when operated by more varied groups of personnel.
Proponents argued that greater use of certification by analysis or simulation would result in safer, less costly product development and approval and bring innovative products to market faster, with designs more suited to the actual population that would put them in service.
Based on the CbA group’s work, the AIAA published a recommended practice (AIAA R-154-2021) for using flight modelling “to reduce flight testing supporting aircraft certification.” It outlines six tasks to accomplish when developing, proposing, and using numerical analysis as an alternative to “established aircraft certification practices.” The document focuses on certification requirements for aircraft performance and handling qualities, static loads and aeroelastic stability. It can be applied to other requirements, AIAA says.
The rotorcraft project in March published the third update of its preliminary CbS guidance. It presents a structured process, starting with the pertinent EASA rotorcraft certification specifications, that outlines the steps in building a certification plan using a flight simulation model, flight simulator, and flight test measurement system (which feeds the flight model and simulator development “with real-world test data to support validation and fidelity assessment.”) Quaranta was scheduled to brief the rotorcraft industry on the project’s latest work in mid-May at the Vertical Flight Society’s annual forum in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Other recent 3D, simulation and validation news includes Siemens Digital Industries Software’s expansion of its long-term partnership with IBM. The partners plan to jointly develop a solution that integrates their respective systems engineering, service lifecycle management and asset management offerings. The SysML v1 standards-based suite of integrated engineering software is aimed at supporting traceability and sustainable product development. Siemens said it will use a digital thread linking mechanical, electronics, electrical engineering and software design and implementation. The objective is to span the product lifecycle, from early design and manufacturing to operations, maintenance, updates, and end-of-life management. Initially, the companies are working to connect IBM Engineering System Design Rhapsody for systems engineering with Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio of software and services, including Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management and Capital software for electrical/electronic systems development and software implementation.
The pairings are intended to help customers address increasing competitive pressures, tight labor markets, and growing environmental compliance objectives, Siemens said, by allowing them to adopt a more holistic management approach.
On the sustainability front, Siemens in 2022 acquired aeroelastic simulation solutions specialist ZONA Technology. The company said adding ZONA technology to its Xcelerator portfolio will help customers make their digital threads more comprehensive and efficient, enabling them to speed innovation as well as ensure on-time and on-budget delivery of products supporting the global drive toward climate-neutral aviation.
Dassault Systémes’ latest efforts go well beyond the atmosphere. Under a new pact with the European Space Agency (ESA), it will bring its advanced tool suites to European companies aspiring to a place in the “New Space” economy of commercialized space operations.
The pact aims to build on a collaboration agreement signed in January 2022 with ESA Business Incubation Centers (BICs) in Bavaria and Northern Germany. The earlier deal made Dassault Systémes a technical industry partner; it offers companies working through those centers its licensed software applications as well as networking and communication opportunities through its 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, an open innovation laboratory and accelerator program.
The new deal calls for Dassault Systémes and ESA to work together in nurturing and accelerating new space startups within the BIC network in Europe.
MathWorks, in addition to helping Rolls-Royce develop safety-critical control systems supporting broader electrification, has aided impressive work in the cosmos. Last year, it helped space engineers steer a spacecraft to the first-ever planned collision with an asteroid, part of a fledgling Earth-defense effort.
On Sept. 26, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or DART) spacecraft crashed into a 492-foot-wide asteroid called Dimorphus. DART was a test to see if the space agency might one day deflect a space rock from colliding with Earth (an event believed to have killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.)
The nearly 1,300-pound DART’s collision at 14,000 mph changed Dimorphus’ orbit only slightly. But the mission was considered a success because DART flew just over 10 months and looped 297.5 million miles through space before it hit its target 11 million from Earth. Its autonomous guidance system, the Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation (SMART Nav), steered DART into the asteroid, with no human intervention for the last four hours of its flight. SMART Nav was developed in MathWorks’ MATLAB and C++.
Independent software vendor Parasoft has specialized in automated software testing and application security for over 30 years. The numerous industries it serves include civil aviation, particularly compliance testing to the DO-178C standard (for commercial software-based aerospace systems) and the DO-278 standard (for communication, navigation, surveillance, and air traffic management software-based systems).
One of Parasoft’s objectives is to help customers reduce complexity by providing them with unified kits that integrate various software tools to save them time and money. Its C/C++test is the fully integrated software testing solution for embedded safety-critical industries, the company says.
Parasoft’s customers have included Alaska Airlines, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, NASA, and Wyle Laboratories. Parasoft worked with Lufthansa Cargo AG to streamline its shipment database for company-owned and chartered freighter flight operations. The German operator wanted a software application that would provide a stable, central control capability for managing cargo service performance without adversely affecting the systems that front-line staff use in feeding and extracting packages and data throughout the cargo network.
Parasoft used its testing expertise to develop an application programming interface (API) to enable various cargo systems to work with the new shipment database without degradation. Working with the Lufthansa Cargo team, Parasoft testers and their tools reduced the regression testing required to field the new system by at least 20 percent compared to manual regression testing, the company said. Regression testing is the process of assuring that new software code can be implemented without causing a loss of functionality (or regression) in existing systems.
Enhanced 3D design, simulation, and validation capabilities continue to change aerospace product development. Leonardo’s helicopter division, for instance, has used CbS to meet specific certification requirements of its AW169 and AW189 models. Now, the division has opened a Virtual Development Environment, based at its Cascina Costa, Italy headquarters and Yeovil, U.K. manufacturing and engineering facility. Embedded in a Digital Simulation Laboratory, that environment leverages advanced simulators that use the avionics and software of actual aircraft to test new capabilities before they are flown. Its ongoing efforts to field the AW609 tiltrotor and develop Clean Sky 2’s Next Generation Civil Tilt Rotor (NGCTR) are benefitting from certification by simulation techniques.
In addition to the European Space Agency, Blue Spirit Aero, a France-based aviation startup developing hydrogen fuel cell technology, is using Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to accelerate the development of its hydrogen-electric light aircraft, Dragonfly, and advance the certification of accessible clean aviation. Blue Spirit Aero image.
“The benefits it brings are huge: reducing cost and time, increasing safety, optimizing synergies across departments and geographies,” said the helicopter division’s managing director, Gian Piero Cutillo. “I’m really pushing very hard on this.”
Airlines, original equipment manufacturers, and maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) organizations are making greater use of drones in inspecting aircraft as they overcome challenges to the deployment of such aircraft in hangars and on airfields.
Drone service providers and their airline and OEM customers say the small, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) give maintenance shops the ability to perform faster, safer inspections — particularly of aircraft crowns. They also provide traceable and objective inspection results that can help resolve questions about an aircraft’s condition and help settle warranty questions.
“Drones are no longer a thing of the future,” said Jan-Christopher Knufinke, Lean innovation manager at Lufthansa Technik, who oversaw a three-year, multi-agency project to assess the applicability of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drones in base maintenance operations. “They will bring benefits to the MRO industry.”
That prospect is the result of years of broad investigation and initial investment in small UAV inspection capabilities.
Jan-Christopher Knufinke Lufthansa Technik
Starting in 2015, for instance, the U.K.-headquartered, multi-national, low-fare carrier easyJet tapped a variety of service and software providers and academic researchers to help it explore the use of drones equipped with a variety of sensors to inspect its fleet of 200-plus Airbus transports. Early partners included the university collaborative Bristol Robotics Laboratory, drone-services firms Coptercraft and Blue Bear, and software developers Measurement Systems and Output42.
In 2018, Airbus showed off its Advanced Inspection Drone maintenance solution — optimized for checking the upper parts of a fuselage inside hangars — as part of its effort to speed up MRO procedures. Fitted with an integral visual camera, a laser-based obstacle detection sensor, flight planner software, and Airbus’ aircraft inspection software analysis tool, the drone was designed to fly automated paths along an aircraft. Airbus said the system could cut a typical day’s inspection down to three hours by capturing images in 30 minutes and analyzing them in 2.5 hours. The drone was designed to fly autonomously.
easyJet was among the earliest proponents of drone use to improve the accuracy and efficiency of visual inspections. University of the West of England image.
That same year, American Airlines partnered with DJI to test that Chinese tech company’s Mavic 2 Enterprise drone in aircraft inspection activities. The tests prompted the airline’s then-vice president of operations and industry affairs, Lorne Cass, to call the drone “a tool of the future that should be in every technician’s toolbox.”
Numerous things stand in that tool’s way. Drones flying in hangars must first map and then avoid overhead structures and elements, things that are rarely concerns for maintenance crews on the floor, work stands, or lifts. Legal requirements must be clarified and met. For instance, drones can’t create hazardous work environments for workers below them. They also must fit legally and operationally into an airport’s facilities and airspace. Singapore currently requires inspection drones on an airport to be tethered to a ground power supply. All that said, the challenges wouldn’t seem to outweigh drones’ benefits.
Advocates see drone-based capabilities as offering advantages in a number of areas. These include zone (or general) visual inspections, which can be long, costly, and subjective processes that pose human-factors and other hurdles for inspectors in accurately detecting damage and locating it on a fuselage. They can lead to prolonged email exchanges with OEMs and last-minute job card updates that cause late deliveries or warranty claims from operators and lessors. An automated drone inspection as aircraft enters the hangar may provide detailed, objective reports and precise, repeatable locations of defects in relation to aircraft structure, proponents say. Such precise detail also would support objective comparison of an aircraft status over time.
Another area is dent detection and measurement that follows events like ground support equipment collisions, bird strikes, hail and damage during production. Detecting and measuring surface dents and buckles is time-consuming. It typically is done by hand, and measurements can be unreliable. Automated 3D technology tools like 8tree’s dentCHECK (which that company says is approved by all major aerospace OEMs) offer mechanics/engineers and inspectors faster means of completing this laborious task. They also improve the traceability and reliability of the work. (8tree says its dentCHECK tool has slashed dent-mapping/reporting times by 90 percent, while delivering greater measurement accuracy and supporting answers that are compliant with structural repair manual requirements.)
When lightning strikes an aircraft, the bird must be grounded until inspectors find its entry and exit points. This can take several hours and lead to operational losses. Automated drone inspection of lightning strike impacts with detection and image analysis by software could take less than two hours, proponents say.
Drone inspections also could speed placard checks and improve the objectivity of paint quality evaluation as well as the efficiency of paint claims (which could help avoid adverse fuel burn from dirty airflow).
A drone inspection’s capture of digital images and precise damage location data also will help support reliable, objective records of visual inspections for comparison and speedier analysis of an aircraft’s condition over time, advocates of drone systems say. This would include assessments of how damage has evolved over time.
The time-consuming work of inspecting for dent damage after hailstorms, bird strikes and ground collisions could be sped up significantly by using drone-borne cameras.
Many outfits are pursuing those and other benefits from greater MRO drone use.
8tree says its dentCHECK tool has slashed dent-mapping/reporting times by 90 percent, while delivering greater measurement accuracy. 8tree image.
Korean Air said it is conducting operational trials of a system can cut visual inspection times by 60 percent with “swarm drone” technology it has developed. The technology uses four small drones programmed to photograph four separate zones on a jet. The airline held a demonstration of the swarm technology last December at its Incheon International Airport headquarters west of Seoul. It expects to launch use of the swarm drones this year.
ST Engineering says its in-house DroScan offers up to 40 percent time-savings over traditional visual inspection methods. ST Engineering image.
The airline developed the 12.1-pound (5.5-kilogram), 3.28-foot (1 meter) wide and high drones in house. By deploying four at once, Korean Air said, it expects to cut the usual visual inspection time of about 10 hours down to about four hours, a 60 percent decrease. This would help to improve on-time flight operations and “and dramatically increase operational stability,” the airline said.
Korean Air said it has developed an operations program that allows the four drones to be programmed to take photos of pre-planned areas. If one fails to operate, the system is configured to automatically complete the mission using the remaining drones.
Equipped with a high-performance camera, each drone can identify objects down to 0.004 inch (0.1 millimeter) in size, the carrier said, allowing for detection of micro defects that cannot be seen from above with the naked eye. Korean Air shares inspection data through the cloud, enabling employees to easily check inspection results anywhere and any time.
The drone system includes a collision avoidance function and geo-fencing to keep each UAV at safe distances from surrounding facilities and prevent break-aways from the mission area, the airline said. Korean Air has revised its procedures to require the presence of safety personnel in addition to pilots and mechanics while the drones are flying. Korean Air said it “will work to improve safety and convenience for workers, stabilize operations, and increase the accuracy of inspections” through continuous trials before officially launching the inspection drones next year.
ST Engineering in Singapore also has developed an in-house drone capability, the DroScan tethered system. The company said the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) has authorized it to use DroScan within the country’s aerodromes in performing general visual inspections of aircraft during maintenance, provided it is tethered to a power source during operations. DroScan is designed to operate on onboard batteries, the company said. Its systems also include collision avoidance, geo-fencing, and smart analytics capabilities.
Matthieu Claybrough Donecle
The drone is paired with a ground control station to automate inspections by flying along pre-planned routes to capture high-definition images. Items picked up by DroScan’s defect-detection algorithm are displayed on the ground control station and an operator can zoom in to certain areas or enhance the images to examine suspected defects. The operator also can manually annotate defects before inputting them into the database.
Donecle’s drone system, paired with 8tree’s dentCHECK software, completed an automatic, dent inspection of an entire Dassault Rafale fighter within one hour, according to the companies. Donecle image.
ST Engineering tested DroScan (which it said offers up to 40 percent time-savings over traditional visual inspection methods) with Air New Zealand and other airline customers. The company said it is in discussions with some customers to refine DroScan’s MRO workflow and conduct operational trials for their fleets.
Michiel van der Eijk Regional Jet Center
Several airlines, third-party MROs, aircraft OEMs, and military operators have enlisted the drone services provider Donecle to improve the efficiency and accuracy of aircraft inspections. Founded in 2015, Toulouse, France-headquartered Donecle has become a world leader in the drone-based automated aircraft visual inspection business. Last April, it expanded its robotic inspections portfolio when it acquired the French autonomous mapping company Dronétix. That company specializes in automatically capturing data and doing 3D reconstruction of small assets (such as aircraft engines or landing gear). Dronétix customers include Safran, which regularly uses a drone for aircraft engine inspections at its Villaroche facility outside Paris.
“Combining the assets and know-how of both companies will strengthen our offer and boost the development of future capabilities,” Donecle CEO Matthieu Claybrough, “Our goal remains unchanged: to offer our customers cost-saving solutions while improving traceability and safety.” He said Dronétix systems will be upgraded with Donecle’s leading imaging technology and cloud connectivity, and the image datasets and AI technologies of both companies will be merged to further increase their performance. “This is an important milestone in Donecle’s growth.”
Dronétix founder and ex-CEO Franck Levy, said, “Donecle is the perfect match to further develop and commercialize our technology. We look forward to seeing the industry further adopt robotic inspection.”
Donecle’s drone inspection tools are being used by such airlines and MROs as AAR, Austrian Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and LATAM Airlines Group in South America. Last year, Airbus qualified Donecle’s technology for use in lightning inspections on A320-family aircraft. In April, LOTAMS (the MRO offshoot of LOT Polish Airlines) signed a multi-year deal for Donecle to help it optimize visual inspections. Donecle will support exhaustive inspections at LOTAMS of Boeing 737NGs and 737MAXs, as well as Embraer 170s, 190s, and 195s. That MRO also will participate in the development and validation of drone capabilities on Boeing 767s and Boeing 787s as Donecle rolls out new wide-body and outdoor inspection capabilities.
On the military front, Donecle said that it completed an automatic, drone-based dent inspection of an entire Dassault Rafale fighter within one hour as part of an 18-month collaborative project with that manufacturer, the French Defence Innovation Agency, and 8tree (which makes 3D optical surface inspection tools) to improve aircraft maintenance and operational condition. 8tree has been collaborating with Donecle and other leading UAV companies on automated flying versions of its 3D tools. The Donecle drone, which used 8tree’s dentCHECK dent-mapping technology, achieved an accuracy of 0.004 inch (0.1 millimeter) depth and 0.079 inch (2 millimeter) width in the Rafale inspection, Donecle said.
The collaborative project had three main objectives, the company said. Demonstrate that the drone can inspect an entire aircraft body quickly and easily, providing time savings. Show that the system’s 3D structured light scanner provides consistent results in all conditions. Prove that the 3D scanner and associated software can identify and measure damage such as dents, impacts, and misalignments.
As part of the project, Donecle said, it has improved its drone automatic navigation with advanced stability algorithms and novel management of the onboard 3D sensor to address a workspace with dynamic lighting conditions and various surface colors and types. It also used a 3D digital twin of the Rafale to map dents, using global reconstruction algorithms “to perform an automated diagnosis leading to instantly actionable results.” All acquired information (such as scans, localization information, and dent measurement results) were saved in a digital database, which “will help tracking the structure evolution in time to improve the aircraft availability and safety,” the company said.
Late last year, Donecle signed a customer agreement with Regional Jet Center, the Amsterdam-based Embraer MRO specialist, to deploy its automated drone inspections on Embraer aircraft for the first time. “We have been looking into drone inspections for the past couple of years as we believe they have the potential to accelerate inspections and improve overall traceability,” said Regional Jet Center Managing Director Michiel van der Eijk. “We were impressed by Donecle’s drone system capabilities. We are looking forwards to this partnership.”
NASA plans to try again September 3 to orbit its first new Moon rocket in a half-century, with the Artemis 1 mission set to lift off from Kennedy Space Center during a two-hour afternoon launch window.
The uncrewed launch from the Florida center’s Pad 39B is intended test out the NASA/Boeing Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and human-rated Orion capsule during a planned 37-day mission around the Moon, including re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere and a splashdown somewhere in the Pacific. Among the main goals of the mission are to show that Orion can survive the heat of re-entry and that NASA, working with U.S. Navy teams, can successfully recover the capsule from the sea.
The Artemis effort is aimed at returning Americans to the Moon, landing the first woman and person of color on that satellite, and laying the foundation for crewed missions to Mars. The effort is named after the Greek goddess who was the twin sister of Apollo.
The first launch attempt on August 29 was scrubbed after a faulty sensor indicated that one of the SLS’s four main-stage (or “core-stage”) engines had not been chilled down to its target safe temperature. The chill-down process, using the rocket’s liquid hydrogen fuel, is designed primarily to ensure that bearings in each engine’s multiple high-pressure turbopumps are saturated by cryogenic hydrogen to minus 420F to prevent excessive wear at startup that could lead to an uncontained pump failure and loss of an engine.
That issue, combined with other problems that cropped up during the August 29 countdown and some questionable weather, prompted NASA managers to scrub the launch. In the days that followed, engineers established the one sensor reading was faulty but that five other engine measurements could be used to confirm that the turbopump bearings were sufficiently cold-soaked. That allowed NASA managers to approve September 3’s attempt.
The two-hour launch window opens at 2:17 EDT. In the event of another scrub, additional launch windows are available on September 4, 5, and 6.
NASA last sent astronauts to the moon on its mammoth Saturn V rocket on Apollo 17 nearly 50 years ago, in December 1972. The Saturn V first flew on an uncrewed mission nearly 55 years ago, on November 1967’s Apollo 4.
With its first stage capable of 8.8 million pounds of thrust, the new SLS rocket will be the most powerful vehicle ever launched. By comparison, the Saturn V’s first stage produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust.
A key objective of the SLS’s development, which began in 2011 and, according to The Planetary Society, has cost more than $23 billion, has been to reuse elements of NASA’s space shuttle that had already been paid for by the U.S. government. (That society says NASA has spent more than $20 billion in developing Orion and $5.7 billion more on ground infrastructure.)
The main stage uses four Space Shuttle Main Engines, redesignated RS-25s and upgraded by Aerojet Rocketdyne with new controller computers and an increased thrust capability of 513,000 pounds each. Each RS-25 on the Artemis 1 rocket has helped launch space shuttles numerous times. Engine No. 1, for instance, flew on 12 shuttle missions. The others flew on three to six flights.
Liftoff will be supported by two Northrop Grumman solid-fuel boosters using segments of boosters produced for the shuttle program. Each booster, which use five segments compared to the shuttle’s four, can produce 3.6. million pounds of thrust.
Flight data analysis providers are expanding their portfolios of services to help aircraft operators derive more value from the flood of information streaming off their flights every day.
Companies like GE Digital, Scaled Analytics, AirSync, CloudAhoy, Collins Aerospace, and Polaris Aero and others are focused primarily on helping aircraft operators identify potential flight safety risks through programs like flight operations quality assurance (FOQA), flight data monitoring (FDM), and overarching safety management systems. These help operators develop measures for avoiding or mitigating those risks.
Aircraft operators — commercial and business aviation ones — are confronting economic pressures from Covid-19’s lingering suppression of travel, as well as persistent labor shortages and rising inflation. They also are working to meet social and political pressures for reducing their flights’ harmful effects on the climate and making their operations more environmentally sustainable.
The data analysis firms are broadening their flight safety focus to help customers meet those economic and sociopolitical pressures — and increase their value to customers — through smarter use of flight operations data.
Luke Bowman GE Digital
“We’ve really started to see, particularly on the airline side, the expansion of the use of this data,” Luke Bowman, senior product manager at GE Digital, said. That prompted the company to update FlightPulse, its fully configurable modular electronic flight bag app, to let pilots access their individual operational efficiency metrics and trends after each flight. This allows an airline to “deputize the flight crews to be part of the sustainability journey. There are a lot of things that pilots can do to operate more sustainably.”
Dion Bozec Scaled Analytics
Likewise, Kanata, Ontario-based Scaled Analytics eyes expanding its services. President and CEO Dion Bozec founded the Canadian company in 2014 to establish a modern, easy-to-use, affordable flight data analysis service.
Flight data analysis by GE Digital indicates business jet pilots all but ignore collision warnings from their aircraft’s TAWS, even if IFR weather and at night. GE chart.
“Safety doesn’t sell, so we’re looking at doing other things with the data,” Bozec said. “Fuel usage is a big one. CO2 emissions is another thing that’s on our roadmap.”
The Payoffs
Flight safety data analysis does have payoffs. GE Digital analyzed 14 years of flight data for business jets from its Corporate FOQA (C-FOQA) service. It found that pilots fully or partially ignored 97 percent or more of callouts from terrain alert and warning systems (TAWS) that their aircraft was about to collide with ground, water, or obstacles.
Controlled-flight-into-terrain (CFIT) crashes are among the world’s top persistent safety concerns, along with runway incursions, loss of control in flight, and midair collisions. Numerous organizations consider preventing CFIT crashes a top priority. Although not the most frequent, CFIT crashes account for a substantial number of fatalities.
GE Digital looked at it 889,886 flights involving 1.85 million flight hours and 3,200 airports in more than 190 countries. Fifty-five aircraft makes and models were included, 60 percent of which were large business jets and 20 percent of which were mid- or super-mid-sized ones.
Of 28,421 TAWS alerts analyzed, the study found that pilots only responded fully to 2 percent of TAWS cautions and 3 percent of more serious TAWS warnings, which alert flight crews to imminent collisions. Pilots did not respond at all to 80 percent of TAWS warnings and had what GE Digital called a weak response to 14 percent (74 percent and 24 percent, respectively, for TAWS cautions). In 3 percent, pilots responded opposite to what TAWS advised (1 percent for TAWS cautions).
More disturbing, perhaps, is that GE Digital found that pilots failed to respond to virtually all TAWS alerts while flying in instrument-flight-rules weather or at night.
Those findings contrast with GE Digital’s assessment of pilot actions following warnings of collisions with other flights from traffic alert and collision avoidance systems (TCAS). Pilots responded in some way to 94 percent of TCAS alerts.
“One of the things that we’re focusing on now is that risk of CFIT and the TAWS response,” Bowman said. “We have the data over many years, and there hasn’t been a meaningful change in those risks.” GE Digital presented its findings at the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) annual Business Aviation Safety Summit in May.
FOQA
FOQA, according to the FAA’s airline-focused Advisory Circular (AC) 120-82, is a voluntary safety program designed to allow operators and pilots “to share de-identified aggregate information with the FAA” so that it can monitor “national trends in aircraft operations” and focus resources on operational risks in flight operations, air traffic control, and airports. FOQA’s goal is to enable operators, pilots, and the FAA “to identify and reduce or eliminate safety risks, as well as minimize deviations from the regulations.”
FOQA traces back to 1960s efforts by British Airways and TAP Air Portugal. In 1992, the FSF defined an industry standard for such programs and coined the term FOQA. AC 120-82 was adopted in 2004. FOQA by then was being adopted by business aviation. GE Digital in 2007 launched its C-FOQA program. CAE Flightscape followed suit in 2009.
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) describes FDM as “the routine collection and analysis of flight data to develop objective and predictive information for advancing safety.” That involves continuously recording flight parameters, routinely collecting that data, and processing it to extract safety-relevant information, such as operating procedure deviations.
Bob Rufli Air Charter Safety Foundation
“We talk a lot about FOQA and FDM, and everybody goes, “Well wait a minute. What’s the difference?” said Robert Rufli, newly appointed director of operations for the Washington, D.C.-headquartered Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF). “The reality is nothing. The whole thing ties together as part of the safety management system that you as an organization have.”
That foundation is beta testing an FDM service for its more than 290 member companies. The test is using AirSync’s Bridge telemetry unit setup and CloudAhoy’s post-flight debriefing app and services. It includes two light jets and one turboprop because it specifically aims to support aircraft that may not have had quick access recorders (QAR) installed. AirSync’s setup can extract data from Garmin devices through a USB connection.
Rufli, who is ACSF’s past chairman and was Pentastar Aviation’s flight operations vice president, will oversee the FDM service and other safety activities.
Looking forward, the FSF is calling on the world’s aviation leaders to take safety data analysis to a new level. Last year, it launched the Learning from All Operations initiative to broaden analysis to “successful” operations as well as ones that result in safety incidents or crashes.
“The time has come for aviation to complement the traditional approaches to learning for safety and recognize the issues that arise from increasingly complex systems and environments,” the FSF wrote in a July 2021 white paper laying out its rationale for the initiative. “We call for a fundamental shift to learn from all operations and events — not just from those that are unwanted.”
Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA)/Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) can help identify and monitor leading indicators of safety-related flight events. It can also correlate multiple data sources and assist with root cause analysis.
Costs Come Down
Identifying hazards and managing risks remains essential, the FSF said, but organizations should seek new insights by analyzing everyday work across all types of outcomes. This could “enable learning that is more frequent, sensitive and timely” and “enhance safety management that is often based on a small subset of performance information, which may introduce avoidable but unrecognized consequences into the aviation system.”
As well-established and proven a practice that it is, flight safety data analysis still faces challenges. Getting company owners and managers to buy into the practice is one. Another is getting pilots to trust and embrace the process. A third is data, both the growing volume available for analysis and the quality of it.
A big hurdle to buy-in has been the cost of flight data analysis systems, in dollars and in staffing (particularly for small and mid-sized operations).
“The cost of having this equipment has really come down,” ACSF’s Rufli said. “If you tried to put in a system like the airlines have into a 1980s or 1990s airplane, it was expensive — $200,000, $300,000 for good system installed in a Gulfstream 4. With the new technology that’s out there nowadays, it’s much, much cheaper.”
ACSF has said its planned FDM service, which is aimed at small and mid-sized operators, should cost about $4,000 a year per aircraft to start and roughly half that thereafter.
FOQA/FDM providers have evolved to reduce their customer’s staffing burden. Most offer “software-as-a-service.” They maintain the database, computing power, and algorithms for analysis. Customers can run the analysis themselves or use the provider’s analysts. They don’t need to buy and host hardware. That’s appealing for an operator with few employees.
“Twenty years ago, when I started, the airline’s safety shop was the only one that had this data,” Bowman said. “People were literally locked in a room with servers and the only thing that went in and out of that room were the discs that came off planes.” Today, that data is typically uploaded to the Cloud and available — in de-identified form — to safety, flight operations, and maintenance managers.
Scaled Analytics is expanding its services to include a “light” SMS allowing customers to link an SMS report to its FDM service so the reported event can be animated. Scaled Analytics image.
Trust — establishing and reinforcing it with pilots — is a big part of conversations about FOQA and FDM programs even today. Advocates ranging from those at union-represented airlines to ones in online forums spend much time explaining that such programs are not punitive (unless a pilot’s actions are proven reckless, negligent, or criminal) and that protections are in place to shield pilots from retribution for operational errors.
One is a “gatekeeper” function through which the identity of pilots involved in an event is not shared with those reviewing that event and an independent person debriefs the pilots, passing on their comments and observations but not their names. Of course, flight data analysis in shops that only operate a few aircraft is difficult to de-identify. It is essential there that management honor the non-punitive pledge.
Gaining pilots’ trust has become easier. One reason may be the general population’s greater use of data.
“Data is everywhere,” Scaled Analytics’ Bozec said. “I’ve got this data that helps me exercise or this data that helps me see how my car is running. Maybe it’s a logical extension to use data to see how I fly and be safer.”
Another reason is lack of punishment. “I have never heard of any operator punishing the flight crew for anything that’s been detected on a FOQA program. Management teams understand how these programs are meant to work. I think maybe that’s helped build that trust.”
The Data Challenge is New and Old
The volumes of data are growing. Take jet engines as an example.
Five years ago, engine manufacturers got data in bytes or kilobytes on single powerplants operating in flight. Single engines today generate gigabytes. “We’ve completely jumped over the megabyte portion,” Arun Srinivasan, Pratt & Whitney’s associate director of strategy for engine health management, said. Given the number of aircraft flying around in the world, “you can imagine the magnitude and volume of data that we are collecting” on engines alone.
Flight data still needs to be cleaned up. Consider touchdown speed.
“It may seem like touchdown should be really easy to know,” Bowman said. It should be when the landing gear squat sensor is activated. But GE Digital’s analysts found that squat sensors actually have a delay in them. “The plane’s moving fast enough that if you have a one second or a two second delay, he said, “the aircraft is significantly further down the runway” when the data says the aircraft just landed. So the analysts looked at other sensors, like wheel speed sensors.
“You can see when the wheels spool up,” he said. “That’s a better indicator than a squat switch. The team recently released a big update to our touchdown time point. Our team is constantly improving the algorithms as well as the software that the algorithms run on.”
GE Digital’s data shows that flight data analysis has contributed to significant reductions in CFIT and loss-of-control crashes and runway excursions. GE Digital chart.
Scaled Analytics has just started doing engine trend reporting to help customers’ maintenance departments schedule engine maintenance and monitor engine health. “We don’t do the actual engine health monitoring here,” Bozec said. “We collect that data for the operator’s experts.”
The company is also offering “light” SMS version that fully integrates with the FDM data. “We are not going to be competing with the many SMS companies out there,” Bozec said. “What we want to do is enable customers to link a pilot’s SMS report right to the FDM flight and look at an animation of the flight.”
GE Digital has integrated its C-FOQA with Polaris Aero’s VOCUS SMS safety management system, enabling flight data from VOCUS to be forwarded automatically to that service. C-FOQA also integrates Collins Aerospace’s ARINCDirect flight planning services, including its Debrief application. That gives pilots direct visibility into C-FOQA data for their own flights.
All these experts agreed that flight data analysis continues to prove its worth. For example, GE Digital’s data shows that flight data analysis has helped reduce CFIT crashes by 49.3 percent, loss of control in flight by 38.1 percent, and runway excursions by 37.2 percent over five years.
“FDM is the validation, the verification of what’s happening out in the operations,” Rufli said.
Noise, vertiports, electrical grids may prompt questions.
Developers of advanced air mobility aircraft are progressing toward mid-decade goals of gaining airworthiness certification for their products, with flight tests being accelerated and production facilities laid out.
“The momentum is really building,” Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt told Bloomberg News at the future-of-mobility UP.Summit in Arkansas last month. Joby is working toward launching service in 2024 with its six-tiltrotor, four-passenger, single-pilot S4 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Advanced air mobility (AAM) participants are developing campaigns to persuade residents and businesses to accept — and even embrace — eVTOL flights in and over their neighborhoods. Successful AAM operations will rely on frequent flights by unfamiliar, low-flying aircraft on all-new routes between freshly built, heliport-like structures scattered around urban and suburban areas.
JoeBen Bevirt Joby
“We’ve seen a two-phased approach to urban air vehicles,” Matheu Parr, customer business director for Rolls-Royce Electrical, said. “Phase I has been the technical/regulatory stage of airframers, propulsion system companies, and regulators coming together” on how to bring electric-powered, short-range commercial air operations to fruition safely. Rolls-Royce is developing a portfolio of products to support those operations, and broader, longer-range ones to follow, as part of its “absolute focus” on achieving Net Zero aviation by 2050, he said. That portfolio includes developing complete electric propulsion systems for eVTOL OEMs Vertical Aerospace and Eve Air Mobility, in which Rolls-Royce has invested.
Matheu Parr Rolls-Royce Electrical
Phase 2 started late last year and is focused on infrastructure, detailing eVTOL use cases “that clearly demonstrate societal benefits … and working with the public to understand their concerns and ensure that we get a good reception to entry into service for these aircraft,” Parr said. That phase has the strong focus of everyone from airlines, airports and airframers to propulsion suppliers. “We need to demonstrate how these aircraft really move to democratizing mobility” and transporting people “in a very different way and at an affordable cost level,” Parr said.
Jeffrey Engler Wright Electric
What is AAM?
AAM is a widely used term without a common definition (often used interchangeably, for instance, with urban air mobility). For our purposes, it aims to use electric or hybrid-electric propulsion systems and distributed power systems for aircraft that will make affordable flight accessible to a broader group of passengers (often with on-demand-like services) and also reduce aviation’s carbon footprint.
“On a per-minute basis, there is nothing other than space travel that is worse for the environment than air travel,” said Jeffrey Engler, founder and CEO of Wright Electric, an upstate New York company committed to producing lightweight electric power systems for aviation and eliminating carbon emissions from all flights under 695 nautical miles (1,288 kilometers) by 2040.
AAM includes:
• Urban air mobility (UAM), which involves vertical-lift flights of about 85 nautical miles (160 kilometers) or less within “mega-cities” of more than 10 million residents.
• Longer vertical-lift AAM flights, beyond roughly 85 nautical miles, to and from mega-city suburbs.
• Regional air mobility (RAM), using fixed-wing electric/hybrid aircraft with ranges up to about 700 nautical miles (1,295 kilometers) for intercity services.
The leading eVTOL professional technical association, the Vertical Flight Society, groups that sector’s developing aircraft into five categories:
• Vectored-thrust eVTOLs use any of their thrusters for lift and cruise. An example is Joby’s S4.
• Lift-plus-cruise ones employ completely independent thrusters for cruise flight and others for lift (with no thrust vectoring). Example: Airbus’ four-passenger CityAirbus.
• Wingless (multicopter) eVTOLs use thrusters only for lift. Example: the EHang 216 from Guangzhou, China’s EHang.
• Hover Bikes/Personal Flying Devices are single-person eVTOLs that so far are wingless, multicopter configurations on which the operator stands or rides a saddle. Example: Stockholm-based Jetson AB’s Jetson ONE.
• Electric rotorcraft are electric helicopters or autogyros that use rotors for lift and thrust. Example: Dallas-based Jaunt Air Mobility’s slowed-rotor, compound, four-passenger Journey.
That society tracks eVTOL developments in an online directory that lists about 680. Only about two dozen had actually advanced to flying prototypes by early this year. The vast majority had been flown remotely, with no passenger.
A Growth Market
Estimates of the AAM worldwide market vary widely, depending in part on whether they include military applications and aircraft other than eVTOLs, according to Adam Cohen, senior research manager at the University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center. Projections of the global market range from $74 billion to $641 billion by 2035. In the U.S., projections for the passenger market range between $2.8 billion and $4 billion by 2030.
The consulting firm Deloitte notes that last year marked a milestone for the AAM market. In 2021, eVTOL companies garnered $5.8 billion in investments. That compared to $4.5 billion reported between 2010 and 2020. The broad special-purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) craze, fueled by accounts flush with Covid-related relief funds and by very low interest rates that left investors hunting higher returns, helped eVTOL firms get funding through public stock sales. Joby Aviation was the first company to go public, Deloitte said, followed by Archer Aviation, Lilium, and Vertical Aerospace. This year, rising interest rates and increased regulatory scrutiny have slowed SPAC activity.
Recent progress in AAM efforts include the following (see boxes):
Noise Reduction Efforts
To gain the public acceptance upon which AAM commercial success depends, industry leaders agree that it’s critical to achieve a clear understanding of how eVTOLs generate noise, how that affects and annoys people under and around their flights, and how OEMs and AAM operators can mitigate those effects. Manufacturers have worked individually to reduce the noise of their aircraft designs, but the industry’s work to identify, manipulate, and regulate eVTOL noise is beginning in earnest.
Joby and NASA partnered for noise testing. NASA’s analysis of the results were no more than about 65 dBA within about 328 feet (100 meters) of the flight track. NASA image.
NASA in June published results of two weeks of mid-2021 noise tests with Joby’s pre-production eVTOL prototype at its Electric Flight Base near Big Sur, California. NASA deployed its Mobile Acoustics Facility containing wireless acoustics measurement systems. Researchers arrayed 58 microphones under the eVTOL’s flight path to capture its acoustic footprint. Joby agreed to allow the test results to be published.
“This was the first full-scale advanced air mobility vehicle that we were able to test,” said Kyle Pascioni, a NASA Langley Research Center aeroacoustics research aerospace engineer and the acoustics lead of that agency’s Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign. “We were able to acquire data on representative conditions of essentially all phases of flight.”
Kyle Pascioni NASA
The tests looked at objective data on the eVTOL’s noise — how much sound pressure it generated in overflight, transition, approach, landing, departure, and hover — and concentrated on the frequencies to which the human ear is most sensitive, a process called A-weighting. “For instance, 3 kHz is the most sensitive frequency of the human ear, so that’s weighted the most,” Pascioni said.
Joby trumpeted its prototype’s acoustic signature of 45.2 A-weighted decibels (dBA) during the flyover at 1,640 feet (500 meters) and 100 knots (185 kph), a level it said would be “barely perceptible against the ambient environment of cities.” NASA researchers focused on sound signatures at lower altitudes. The target was about 350 feet (107 meters) to near touchdown. That simulated near-vertiport operations and enabled researchers to get the best signal-to-noise ratio and resolution. According to a paper on NASA’s analysis of the results, hovers, approaches and departures were all no more than about 65 dBA within about 328 feet (100 meters) of the flight track. Approaches were noisiest.
The noise tests did not assess more subjective perceptions, or psycho-acoustic perspectives, including the annoyance level, if any, of eVTOL flights. That work, which may inform eVTOL noise regulations, remains to be done. “When you start getting into the local communities and even the federal regulators, there’s a lot we need to know about this if we want the AAM system to really scale,” said NASA AAM mission manager Davis Hackenberg. “We don’t want to go into urban environments and scare everybody away from the system.”
Supply of raw materials, particularly for batteries, will be a challenge as electric vehicle sales increase. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence graph.
Infrastructure Conundrums
Another key hurdle is developing the networks of eVTOL vertiports that will underpin flight operations and the local “microgrids” to enable them by providing aircraft with electrical power for battery charging stations. “If you’re an all-electric system and you’re dependent on electricity, it’s about $1 million a mile,” said Rex Alexander, president of Five-Alpha, who may be the world’s leading expert on vertiports. “If you’re looking at having a large vertiport, you’re probably going to have to have your own substation. Well, if there is one thing people hate more than heliports, it’s substations.” He added that a substation can take two to four years to build.
More Supply Chain Drama
A longer-term challenge is the supply of raw materials, particularly for batteries. Low prices for critical minerals — lithium, graphite and cobalt — depressed investment in mining over the last decade, said George Miller, a senior price analyst for the mineral-reporting company Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. That, combined with the rapid growth in electric vehicle sales, means demand for those minerals will outstrip their supply over the next decade, drive up prices, and constrain availability.
A “gigafactory” produces batteries for electric vehicles at large scale. On average, each year one consumes 88,000 tons of flake graphite and 49,600 tons of synthetic graphite (both of which are used to manufacture anodes for lithium-ion batteries), 27,500 tons of lithium, 6,000 tons of cobalt (for the batteries’ cathodes), and 21,000 tons of nickel. Miller said today 300 new gigafactories are planned for construction.
“These are growth rates you won’t see for any other commodity market in our lifetime,” Miller said. Before 2010, one new lithium mine could meet excess battery demand for one to five years. “We need to see multiple world-class assets coming to production on a yearly basis from now on out until 2030 to account for this growth in battery demand.”
George Miller Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
Other supply chain challenges include the need to process minerals specifically for end users and time required to qualify their supply for safety-critical applications. “This is a multi-year process for Western automakers especially and requires materials from miners, cathode manufacturers, and anode manufacturers to pass through several stages of development” before they can be qualified for an automotive, or eventually an air mobility, value chain, Miller said.
“The good thing for advanced air mobility is because operations at scale are a decade out, there is actually time to account for that demand” for greater supply of critical minerals, he said.
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