A Preliminary Study on Civil Aircraft Post-flight Automatic Maintenance Test Philosophy and Design

Civil aircraft maintenance tests are used to detect latent failures in the Flight Control System (FCS) that cannot be detected through continuous monitoring. And each maintenance tests have their required exposure time intervals. The exposure time intervals are used to determine whether the maintenance tests will be executed automatically or manually. This Paper focused on the study of automated tests hosted in the FCS, which do not require the maintenance user intervention, and these tests will be automatically initiated following rollout phase. Automated tests are capable of commanding the primary surfaces and injecting failures into the FCS components, therefore they will be allowed to execute only when the aircraft is in a safe state. The suite of logic that manages and controls automated tests could contribute to hazardous or catastrophic hazards. This logic is referred as post flight and needs to be investigated to ensure the safety of the civil aircraft.