PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - AF447
Thread: AF447
View Single Post
Old 30th Jul 2009, 20:19
  #4023 (permalink)  
JD-EE
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: I am where I am and that's all where I am.
Posts: 660
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Machinbird, I suspect the entire sensor system on aircraft needs to be rethought from 100 year old technology such as tubes that transmit pressure data from the pitot tube location to the computers.

Suppose you migrate to "smart sensors". Things like PIC chips are little more than the cost of their sand these days. The pressure sensor could be built into the pitot assembly with no long tubes to collect crud. The sensor data could be massaged through a calibration table custom to at least the probe design if not the probe itself and then transmitted digitally to the newer ADIRU equivalents. Such a concept would allow for multiple sensors and multiple types of sensors for the same data in the hope that when one type of sensor for a given data item suffered accuracy problems due to ambient conditions the alternate type would not.

In the 1980s it made sense to run tubing. In this century it makes sense to run wire or fiber and accept the degraded inaccuracies. (Double negative intended for the sake of sarcasm.)

JD-EE
JD-EE is offline