incident rate can be as high as 50%, particularly true for complex avionics when pressures to keep equipment serviceable during operations are immense. EADS Test & Services believed they had an answer to the problem. If the number of “No Fault Founds” could be reduced, a significant improvement in equipment availability could be achieved. The next question, inevitably, is how
such a reduction could be found? The answer was immediately obvious; the problem must be tackled at source, identifying truly faulty components quickly, efficiently and above all, accurately, prior to removal. Being able to diagnose faulty components prior to removal sounds easy, but it is a challenge to deliver. Of course, there is equipment available today that can diagnose faults in certain, specific equipments, but to devise a solution that can truly deliver the right level of information across multiple equipments - at the right standard - further steps had to be taken.
A General Purpose test set, portable and lightweight with the ability and flexibility to be easily configured for differing applications was the answer. It also had to be adaptable and easily supportable, meaning maintenance costs could be kept to a minimum. The advantages were obvious from the
beginning; reducing
the plethora of front line bespoke GSE will deliver a significant cost saving to the user. If maintenance costs could also be significantly reduced through the early identification of non-faulty components, lower through life costs and greater availability would be a serious proposition.
Realising the advantage to be gained for both end-user and supplier, EADS Test & Services invested in the development of a general purpose but portable automatic test set that could achieve these goals. Recent advances in test and measurement technology allowed the more traditional test to be significantly reduced in size - something that would have been considered impossible in previous years.
By housing a number of
measurement and stimulus “Off the Shelf” instruments – each not much larger than a credit card - into a ruggedised chamber, the building blocks of a portable test set are created. Combine this with a control system and there is the capability to undertake very complex avionic testing. It may sound simple, but after
AW 159 Wildcat courtesy Agusta Westland (left) Mk 1 miniFLITS courtesy EADS
G4 DEFENCE
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