Advanced flight test technologies

This paper describes several modern flight test techniques, and associated airborne instrumentation, that are currently being developed at the Flight Research Laboratory (FRL) of NRC's Institute for Aerospace Research (IAR), The techniques include: i) a real-time Kalman filter integration of NovAtel differential GPS (DGPS) and low-cost Litton LN-200 inertial measurement unit (IMU) data, to provide accurate, high bandwidth aircraft inertial state information for various flight test requirements; ii) a novel air data instrumentation and real-time air data calibration procedure, based on DGPS and Kalman filtering-smoothing; and iii) an in-flight aerodynamic model identification capability demonstrated using the NRC Falcon 20 research aircraft. For each technique, key technical performance metrics are given, the current development status is indicated, and planned future developments are described.