By Vicky Falcón
NAVAIR Public Affairs Office

For people living in Southern Maryland, poor radio reception in their vehicles is a common, frustrating problem. But at NAS Patuxent River when the vehicle is an F/A-18 and the telemetry signal involved is for monitoring the flight of a new aircraft, the impact of that lost signal is more than annoying – it can be dangerous.

Jim Farrell is a former Black Belt within the NAVAIR AIRSpeed program. He is currently Division Head of the Aircraft Instrumentation Division within the NAVAIR Ranges Department. Once all suggested improvements are implemented, his team ultimately projects a reduction in the amount of telemetry loss during F/A-18 ground operations at Pax River by 50%, saving money and increasing pilot safety in 2006.

Farrell took on the problem as a Black Belt project in January ’06. Members of the Black Belt project team were made up of representatives from the Flight Test Engineering, Instrumentation, and Telemetry Ground Station Support groups.

Dennis Normyle is head of the Telemetry System Engineering section (AIR-5.2.4.3) and an AIRSpeed Green Belt who participated on the project team.

“One of the biggest successes from this AIRSpeed project was getting representatives from all three organizations together,” he said. “This problem (loss of telemetry) has been around a long time and AIRSpeed has given us a vehicle to analyze the problems and establish procedures without the traditional finger pointing.”

According to Farrell, loss of telemetry (TM) signal was a common occurrence during flight test programs requiring real-time analysis.

“Not only does testing suffer a cost and schedule increase when loss of telemetry signal occurs,” he said, “but there is also a decreased safety margin.”

Normyle uses cell phone reception as another analogy to loss of telemetry. “Intermittent drop out (of TM) is like having a bad connection on a cell phone with lots of static,” he said. “But an absolute loss of data is scary with a test aircraft because we have no idea what’s going on. It’s like a dropped call on a cell phone.”

Normyle, Farrell and the rest of the team looked at all F/A-18 test flights flown at Patuxent River using serial streaming data (continuous streaming of data from the aircraft) and set a goal to reduce the current eight-minute average TM loss for F/A-18 ground operations by 50%.

“TM dropouts carry different weights depending upon when they occur,” explained Farrell. “Although TM loss does occur during flight test, the team did not see data from previous F/A-18 flights on the Atlantic Test Range that indicated a consistent problem or one that was significant enough to address using Lean Six Sigma tools.”

According to Normyle, the worst TM loss was on the ground, causing significant delays in test schedules since long hours of preflight testing on the runway precedes any in-flight tests.

“By decreasing TM loss on the ground we will obviously improve our TM loss in the air,” he added.

“Traditionally TM on the ground is known to be poor,” explained Normyle. “In the past it was assumed that TM would get better in the air and generally that occurred.” But, he continued, not always.

“The assumption that telemetry would get better once the aircraft took off led to a situation we coined “TM Chicken,” he said. “Test teams were taking off with poor TM and once in the air there was added pressure to press on. The folks at the RTPS (Real-time Telemetry Processing System), instrumentation and the test team would work the problem in real-time, but the cost in spent gas alone was exorbitant.”

With a weighted average hourly cost to operate an F/A-18 at $784.10 per minute the potential savings for this project were huge – approximately $800,000 per year in Type II savings are expected. Type II savings are actually waste elimination where assets/resources are freed up to be reassigned to other value-added work and/or future savings.

Potential savings could exceed $4 million with the implementation of ongoing and planned solutions for TM loss. Those solutions include the installation, relocation and upgrade of antennas as well as the institution and standardization of TM and maintenance procedures.

But financial savings are not the only savings the team is hoping to be able to track. “We’d like to see measurable improvement in flight test safety, an increased confidence level of the test team, and reduced risk of test point delays,” said Farrell.

“We focused on reducing telemetry system inefficiencies by increasing TM system reliability,” he continued. “The team was able, through the creative efforts of several team members, to collect and measure TM loss on the Pax River airfield, ramps, taxiways and runways during F/A-18 operations.”

One of the first actions that took place was an expedited installation of an additional TM antenna at VX-23. An initial look at the data indicated a significant decrease in the percentage of TM loss along VX-23 flight lines and taxiways.

The team’s goal is to further reduce TM loss by surveying the Pax River airfields; improving the efficiencies of the antenna operators; creating Project Engineering Station (the telemetry control room) setup and operational processes; standardizing TM setup, check-out and installation procedures; and creating TM installation and check-out training.

Two AIRSpeed Green Belt charters have also been drafted as part of the outcome from Farrell’s project. One of those is being led by Normyl, further addressing PES setup and preparation for test flight. Another project will address situational awareness of antenna operators and create operational processes.

Rick Quade is the AIRSpeed Deployment Champion for NAVAIR’s Test and Evaluation Department. “This was a very good project and it was well run,” he said. “It was definitely a VOC (voice of the customer) driven project that required a great teaming effort to support.”

According to Quade the project met multiple objectives by improving safety, improving the collection of data, and improving the quality of the data collected (and reducing the potential for rework).

Farrell agrees. “In the future,” he said, “TM dropout issues will only be exacerbated by the complexity and dynamic nature of pending flight tests for new aircraft (such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Lightning II).”

Though TM loss will continue to affect testing, the success of this project and the long-term plans to further reduce TM loss at Pax River means improved processes for future testing and increased safety for test pilots.

For more information about NAVAIR AIRSpeed, go to http://www.navair.navy.mil/navairairspeed/.