Browse Topic: Certification
Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft introduce complex monitoring challenges due to distributed propulsion, lightweight structures, and variable operating conditions. This paper presents advanced Frequency and Orders domain techniques that repurpose existing flight control, propulsion, and structural sensor data to enhance observability without additional instrumentation. By transforming vibration, acoustic, and electrical signals into frequency and order domains, the approach enables detection of harmonics, resonance, and fault signatures tied to rotor dynamics, supporting adaptive control and predictive maintenance. Beyond rotor systems, these techniques are equally effective for monitoring electric motor health, gearbox wear, bearing degradation, and structural coupling effects in composite airframes. They also provide insight into power electronics and thermal management systems by identifying spectral anomalies linked to electrical imbalance or cooling inefficiencies. Aggregated fleet data strengthens prognostic capabilities, enabling early detection of systemic issues and trend analysis. Applications include mitigating ground resonance and modal instabilities, as well as improving reliability of propulsion and structural subsystems. Integration into avionics emphasizes computational efficiency, scalability, and compliance with standards such as DO-160 [1], DO-178 [2], ARP4761 [3] and ARP4764 [4]. Simulation and bench testing confirm feasibility, demonstrating potential to enhance safety, reliability, and lifecycle cost for next-generation urban air mobility platforms.
Full-scale static test (FSST) is a key test program for the certification of new helicopter airframe. The strength and deformation requirements in airframe certification are substantiated by full-scale tests of the airframe structures. It provides experimental evidence that the structure is able to support limit loads without detrimental permanent deformation and carry ultimate loads for at least three seconds. In design stage, the total number of flight and ground limit load conditions is around 500. In FSST, the number of test load cases should be remarkably reduced. However, the selected load scenarios should cover all of the critical design load scenarios. In this paper, test load generation procedures in FSST of a light utility helicopter is explained. The comparison of design load envelope and static test load envelopes are provided.
This paper outlines observations from an FAA-sponsored research project that examined aviation Fly-By-Wire (FBW) accidents. The goal was to identify risk areas that will help guide a focus for FAA certification testing. Part of this study specifically focused on current powered-lift tiltrotors, identifying six general categories of causal factors for accidents, which will be discussed in detail regarding how they influenced flight control designs. The results of this survey, along with extrapolation to current designs, will be discussed and will illustrate why manufacturers are moving toward state-based flight control designs. In a state-based flight control scheme, the pilot does not have direct control over aircraft attitudes and motor tilt angles. Instead, the pilot requests a speed and or flight path with inceptor input, and the commanded attitudes and motor tilts are scheduled by the flight control computer. Additionally, recent lessons learned from electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft accidents will be discussed, along with a comparison of powered-lift causal factors to accidents in the transport category FBW fixed-wing aircraft. From this analysis, broad observations will be offered about the trend of how accident-causal factors may evolve with greater maturity in aircraft design. This accident survey will be detailed further as part of an upcoming FAA Research Report.
Aircraft Certification is a mature and complex bureaucracy that has successfully ensured a very high degree of safety of aircraft design, construction, operation and maintenance. Outside of a very few doing the work, there is a general lack of knowledge of certification details. For novel technologies such as electric power, and innovative configurations such as multi-rotors, the rules are far less mature and still emerging and so also poorly understood. Within the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) initiative, many new aircraft developments are underway using novel configurations, and the public announcements of regulatory progress toward FAA or EASA Type Certification capitalize on this ignorance by being vague or even misleading. Honeywell conceived the Regulatory Readiness Level (RRL) indicator as an objective measure of certification status to serve the AAM industry and ecosystem, with applicability across aviation. The released RRL Version 1 now enables credible, objective assessment of new aircraft progress toward FAA Type Certification, and Operational Approval for Part 135 operations, to allow consistent apples-to-apples comparisons with other aircraft in development. An emerging complementary version of the rubric for EASA Type Certification is ready for publication to enable RRL determination against the European Union criteria. Future releases will consider other Nation's regulatory authorities, supplemental types certifications (STCs), and risk-based airworthiness assessments such as the Specific Operations Risk Assessments (SORA).
In this paper, we describe an innovative V&V approach using the SCADE product, enabling significant reduction of effort while preserving compliance with DO-178C/DO-331. This new approach relies on a unique capability: automatic generation of Low-Level Tests. Details about savings will be provided to show how we can reduce costs, speed up certifications, and bring products to the market faster. We will conclude by summarizing the actual benefits and describing ongoing work to bring other savings in the future.
In the last years, new rotorcraft configurations have increased the attention among industries, through which the tiltrotor one due to its capability of combining both rotorcraft and aircraft advantages. However, there are situations where the vertical take-off mode could be enhanced in hard environmental and flight conditions. Therefore, to address this challenge, this work aims to develop a methodology to characterize a roll take-off model for a general tiltrotor configuration in such situations. By combining the integration of the equation of motion and geometrical assumptions, the runway distance is determined for an acceptable range of nacelle tilting angles. The process is developed by meeting the requirements defined by the regulations, combining the aircraft certification standards (CS23 and CS25) with the available tiltrotor certification basis from the FAA project #TC3419RC-R. Following the Nominal application, a sensitivity analysis is carried out, which studies the main effects on the results by varying one variable at a time in terms of weight, wing-loading, and disk-loading.
To this point in aviation history, a typical aircraft type certification program has focused on the constituent systems that make up the aircraft, decomposing them further and further down until reaching their elemental parts and how they interact. This approach has traditionally treated the actual communication technology as only an interface, with technology and implementation based on a decision between multiple stakeholders via an ICD and high-level requirements. This has been necessary to ensure the accurate and on-time delivery of safety-critical data between nodes. When using legacy point-to-point or bus-based data communication technologies like ARINC 429 or MIL-STD-1553, this approach has worked well enough as these technologies are relatively straightforward and proven technologies. However, as onboard bandwidth needs for safety-critical data increase, these legacy technologies are increasingly no longer capable of meeting the needs of system integrators. Ubiquitous, high-bandwidth Ethernet is the obvious solution to these needs and, indeed, it has been used for quite some time in onboard networking applications for low Development Assurance Level (DAL)/non-safety critical data. However, as Ethernet moves into high-DAL applications, the certification of the Ethernet network itself becomes a major complexity that must be addressed directly.
This paper describes the methodology, involving testing and simulation activities, to assess malfunction conditions of complex systems installed on fly-by-wire vehicles, including the evaluation of their effects. This paper provides also a description about how the system malfunction tests are designed, driven by input requirements and systems capability and behavior. With respect to prior publications, this paper includes some practical test examples, based on systems monitoring, logics and alerting functions. The case study described here comes from a portion of multiple laboratory certification tests done for AW609 Tiltrotor, focused on Avionics System malfunctions. These tests and simulations are a valuable Means of Compliance with respect to applicable airworthiness rules, and a suitable means to verify the design safety requirements. Three relevant examples are presented, grouped by input requirement and safety conditions. The effect of such malfunctions is evaluated, with respect to the Avionics System output produced to keep adequate flightcrew awareness about the vehicle status.
The paper deals with the status of development and qualification/certification of electromechanical actuation for Helicopters and VTOL applications with the focus on aspects relevant to the Fault-Tolerance. In particular a linear Electromechanical Actuator (EMA) architecture is presented, derived from a fault tolerant ballscrew-based differential (speed-summing arrangement) actuation system patented by UMBRAGROUP S.p.A. The focus is on safety-critical and high reliability/availability requirements for electromechanical actuation certification. The main characteristic is the use of two independent mechanical actuation channels in the same envelope driven by independent Motor Control Electronics (MCEs). At the state of the art, the presented fault-tolerant architecture is under development in flight-critical swashplate application for eVTOL platform and under feasibility study in flight-critical swashplate application for CS27 platform.
The development of turbulence criteria to provide early guidance for the design of vertiports is presented in this paper. For any aircraft, winds, in particular crosswinds and gusty winds, are top of mind for all pilots engaging in take-off and landing maneuvers. It is anticipated that the same will be true for VTOL and eVTOLs landing on vertiports, in particular as new vertiports are built closer and closer to urban centres. First, a review of the current design criteria for vertiports around the world related to wind is presented, highlighting the commonality between the guidance and the gaps in their content. Second, the controllability criteria that VTOL and eVTOLs will likely need to meet in the pursuit of an airworthiness certification are reviewed and their pertinence with regards to vertiport design are discussed. Third, the characters of the wind and their impact on eVTOL flights at or near take-off and landing infrastructure is explored. Finally, a set of turbulence criteria for vertiports and a turbulence index are proposed. The index includes a scale for conditions ranging from favorable for take-off and landing; to more and more demanding conditions; up to turbulence conditions to be firmly avoided.
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The aerospace ecosystem is a complex system of systems comprising of many stakeholders in exchanging technical, design, development, certification, operational, and maintenance data across the different lifecycle stages of an aircraft from concept, engineering, manufacturing, operations, and maintenance to its disposal. Many standards have been developed to standardize and improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and security of the data transfer processes in the aerospace ecosystem. There are still challenges in data transfer due to the lack of standards in certain areas and lack of awareness and implementation of some standards. G-31 standards committee of SAE International has conducted a study on the available digital data standards in aircraft asset life cycle to understand the current and future landscapes of the needed digital data standards and identify gaps. This technical paper presents the study conducted by the G-31 technical committee. This paper reviews the data being exchanged between various stakeholders in the aerospace asset lifecycle and the availability of standards for the data transfer within the aerospace ecosystem. It identifies gaps based on the list of currently available data standards, and then creates a future landscape to address the needed digital data standards. This paper focuses on aircraft operations, maintenance, transfer, disposal processes, and post-build stage, and does not address the detailed interactions during the aircraft design, development and manufacturing phases. Its scope is also limited to key stakeholder interactions throughout the different stages of the aircraft operations, maintenance, and retirement.
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