Originally Posted by
yoko1
Aviation Week reports that the tests were conducted in Boeing's engineering flight simulator (i.e. a testing platform, not a training device), so I suspect that from a system standpoint they were emulating the aircraft hardware and software as much as feasible.
OK, not Boeing (although it is, now) and not commercial, but military flight control systems, but I did see how they did this at McDonnell Douglas some years ago. They had a big Honeywell computer that was interfaced to the FCC, and had some controls and instrument panel displays provided by another computer, like a Unix workstation (Sun, SGI or so). The Honeywell simulated the aircraft flight dynamics and all the sensor inputs (air data, gyros, feedback from flight control positions sensors, etc.) So, it was to mimic everything the FCC would sense while flying the aircraft. It also recorded all the inputs and outputs so they could be compared with what the FCC was supposed to do.
I'm guessing this is the sort of system Boeing is using to test the 737 Max FCC, and they've got the necessary flight controls rigged to it so the test pilots are doing the normal trim settings, etc. But, it is probably on a desktop with most of the indicators and controls just appearing on a couple screens.
And, from the VAGUE descriptions I've seen so far, it sounds like it could be a problem with priority of various tasks on the FCC. It seems these days an FCC really should NOT be running out of CPU cycles.
Jon