IFD540 Certification Status

I hope to use this new thread as a location to provide periodic updates on the IFD540 product and specifically on it's progress toward FAA certification.

I'd like to ask that any product specific questions on features and the like are asked in other pre-existing or newly-formed threads and we keep this particular thread focused on the cert progress.

In this thread, I'll cover hardware and software progress as well as flight test and lab test milestones reached enroute to TSO and STC approvals.  To the extent that it makes sense, I'll post target dates and readers can use this thread to independently assess progress towards certification.

At this point, we have 12 IFD540 units under test that are used in our four test aircraft, three integration test labs (ITL), and in the environmental test lab that we're renting time in.  I personally fly the units 3-5 times per week and use them in an ITL every day.    This is going to be a great product when we can get it in your airplane.

Hi Tony,

It's a little of both.  By that I mean there is no notion of FAA certification for a hardware unit without accompanying software for a product like this.

Hardware qual has two principal elements to it.  If the hardware contains what are called "Programmable Logic Devices" (ours does) or other similar types of equipment, then there is a standard that we must show compliance with (DO-254).  That is a rough analog to the software standard (called DO-178).  The second part of hardware qual is the environmental qualification.  Environmental qual is governed by a standard called DO-160.  DO-160 will drive us to various vibration, heat, cold, altitude, humidity, RF emissions and susceptibility, etc types of tests.  We are running both the DO-254 and DO-160 hardware qual efforts in parallel.  The environmental one is typically several months long (lots of tests, some with long durations) and the outcome of each is that we produce two Hardware Qual Reports that are submitted to the FAA as part of the overall compliance data package.   We'll turn those reports in before the final software and flight test reports and while the FAA will likely review and comment on them, they won't likely "sign off" on them without the accompanying software reports.

I'm also not sure how well understood the overall cert process is but we talk of it in terms of "TSO" and "STC" efforts.  Each of the TSO and STC cert efforts  have elements of hardware and software data to them but the easiest way to think of that is:

TSO - take this to mean the equipment has been shown to meet various instrument technical standards (e.g. Moving map, traffic display, lightning sensor, FMS, etc).  In the case of TSO, we have demonstrated compliance to the three hardware and software standards too (DO-254, DO-160, DO-178).

STC - this is the approval for installation in an airplane.   You can have TSO for a product but if you don't have STC, you have no approved basis to install that gear in an airplane.

I expect to report on all of those milestones in this thread (254, 160 and 178 tasks, TSO, STC and flight test milestones, etc).

So that was a long-winded way of saying that for all practical purposes, both the hardware and software get certified as a unit.  But, that doesn't mean we won't be building up a bunch of units in the factory.  We'll be sufficiently through the hardware qual far enough ahead of the software qual that even though we'll technically build up the units at risk, the risk of having to disassemble and redo some hardware element will be very low.   That way, we have a slew of built up units awaiting the final TSO and STC approval such that the day after we have those certs, we can be shipping units.

Make sense?

Steve,

IFD540 Development Status (29 Nov 2012):

So Steve, if one was planning a cockpit upgrade around your 540 deliveries, hypothetically of course, when would be a good time to plan on taking one’s airplane being down?  Feb?  Mar? Apr?

Hi Jayson,

Yes, the Nav, Charts and Obstacle data is all loaded through that USB port on the front of the bezel.

No.  We still have a bunch of work still to go.  That being said, we are very confident we'll have cert and be shipping in 1H 2013.

IFD540 Status Update (31 Jan 2013):

We are making terrific progress but we are still a few months away from being done.   There are a lot of ways to slice this up but in general, here is a breakdown of the various efforts underway to get the IFD540 certified and installed in customer airplanes:

Hardware Qualification:

We are still undergoing the official for-credit hardware qual of the units.  This consists of three sub-categories.  We have to conduct all this testing on the fully assembled and representative units.  Accounting for potential snags, I bet we have 8ish weeks ahead of us on this effort.

1.       Environmental Qual (DO-160) – this is progressing well.  This part of testing in which the unit has be to subjected to all kinds of environmental testing to include extreme heat, and cold, altitude testing, humidity testing, RF emissions testing, RF susceptibility testing, vibration testing, salt spray, dust, dot, dot, dot.  This testing gets conducted in a special environmental test lab and the test results get submitted as part of the FAA approval process.  We’ve been in that testing since early December and have a few more weeks of that effort ahead of us.

2.       Complex Electronics Qual (DO-254) – we have conducted our own not-for-credit testing to ensure we have no problems but have not yet started the formal qual testing yet.  When we do, it should take a few weeks until completion.  For the techies in the audience, Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs) is where a lot of the embedded logic is conducted and we just have to show nothing unexpected or nefarious happens in that hardware/firmware.

3.       Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) testing – so far so good but not quite done.   The FAA specifies minimum performance requirements for hardware (e.g. GPS, VHF, etc) and each one of those standards comes with pages (and sometimes pages and pages and pages) of tests that are specified and must be run and shown to meet published pass/fail criteria.

 

Software Qualification:

I think the simplest way to think of this is a two-part effort – Development and Formal Qualification.  Both are governed by an FAA-written software process called DO-178.    This is a requirements-based process that involves all aspects of software development and cert starting with top level product definition and decomposing that into smaller and smaller and more detailed and more detailed written requirements, then the software coding to embody those requirements and then a lot of different kinds of testing designed to validate all the requirements are correct and fully embodied by the code, and conversely, the code doesn’t have anything in there that isn’t governed by the requirements.  A related type of testing is to show that every possible path the code can take results in a known or deterministic end state.  This is man-years of effort for a product of this size and complexity.   It is also an iterative process in that inputs from flight test and the FAA and sometimes the customer base, can be cause for rework and then a lot of those steps must be re-performed to re-validate the changed code.

We don’t run this in a serial manner.  In other words, we don’t wait until all the code is done before we start the validation testing.  We are well into the formal qualification of the code but some parts of the code are still changing as we fly it a lot and find things that simply must be changed.  The closer we get to the cert finish line, the higher the bar is that a potential code change must clear before we put it in.

This effort is running in parallel with the hardware qualification.   It’s all relative but flight test is still finding a number of areas that need to, or we want to, change in order to deliver a truly kick-ass product.

Past experience says it’s wise to be conservative on estimating the impact of these changes on schedule so I would estimate we have a few months of work still ahead of us before we declare the code to be 100% done.

 

Flight Testing:

Of course I find this to be the most enjoyable part of the effort by a long shot.   We have two dedicated airplanes for flight test and two other aircraft that we periodically use when we need to perform special tests or temporarily ramp up flight test intensity.

One thing that has slowed us down over the last 5 weeks is that one of our test airplanes has been undergoing a major modification in which a lot of sensors and 3^rd party boxes that the IFD540 integrates have been installed.  We did this to ensure we had a truly representative environment for testing in case our lab configurations couldn’t adequately represent certain flight conditions or corner conditions.   We can also fly the airplane regularly “in the system” by filing IFR and flying in real airspace dealing with real flight scenarios day in and day out.   We get that airplane back this weekend and we’ll be back into full intensity flight testing.

One side note, while I would love to show off our stuff and let people take their own personal evaluation flights in these planes, we have created a self-imposed “no flights for outside people” rule and we’re staying disciplined on adhering to it until the system is “done”.  Sorry.  (I will make periodic posts of pix on my Twitter feed however)

 

FAA Involvement:

For better or worse, this one has us worried.   The crew that we work with in the FAA are all good guys trying to do a good job.   However, I’m sure no one will find it surprising to note that it is a big organization with lots of disparate parts and heavy workloads, all leading to a burdensome bureaucratic environment.   There are two specific areas that will result in real schedule uncertainty.   The first is that the STC project has been put into “sequencing”.   This is an FAA term that means the level of FAA involvement in the cert process is large enough that the regional office is not permitted to slip it in to their normal work flow.   Until it is out of sequencing, no one in the FAA can work the certification approvals and the big unknown is no one in the FAA can tell when it will pop out of sequencing, and which regional FAA office will perform the certification approval tasks.   The other event that is very disruptive to knowing with high confidence when the unit will be certified/approved is an FAA task called a Multi-Pilot System Useability Evaluation (MPSUE).   This is a FAA-run evaluation of the system in the lab and in flight in which they conduct a human factors analysis of the safety and certifiability of the unit.  For anyone following the R9 SynVis cert effort thread, you have some sense of the MPSUE saga that is likely to unfold.  And unlike in the case of SynVis which was an “abbreviated” MPSUE, the FAA has informed us that the IFD540 will receive a “full” MPSUE.   That is likely to involve at least 10 FAA flight test pilots and flight test engineers and human factors folks (and maybe more) and coordinating all those schedules and viewpoints is a non-trivial task.  It is a safe assumption to say something will need to be changed in the code as a result of that FAA input and therefore we can’t declare we’re 100% code complete until the MPSUE has been conducted and any changes implemented.  And of course, they can’t even start scheduling the MPSUE until the project comes out of sequencing.

The rest of the FAA involvement is just par-for-the-course types of tasks and are in the noise when compared to the above two challenges.

I view this area as the single biggest schedule wild card, by far.

 

Launch Readiness/Pilot Program:

Let’s try to end on a high note.   Despite all that work noted above, we are also running a parallel launch readiness effort so we’re as ready for prime time as we can be.   This has all kinds of sub-parts to it like ramping up our production line at the factory, having ship kits all ready to go, having simulators and user documentation ready to go (we don’t plan to release those until just before certification) and a lot of other typical product launch types of tasks.

One big part of our plan is to run a “Pilot Program” that will start the day after we receive TSO and STC approval/certification.  This “Pilot Program” is intended to run long enough (I’d guess 4-10 weeks) for us to be confident there aren’t any must-fix gotchas before we open the flood gates to full-rate production and installations.   I am planning on installing TSO/STC units in 20-30 customer aircraft and collecting installation and flight behavior input as required.    I have many more details on the Pilot Program that we’ll share in the coming next few weeks in which I explain the types of aircraft configurations and patterns of flying we’re looking for and seeking volunteers to participate in that program.  I wouldn’t call it a “Beta Test” program since we’ll be fully certified by that time (and by the way, we have no plans to install pre-certified gear in people’s airplanes) but it will definitely be in the veins of an early adopter kind of phase.   That explanation and solicitation for volunteers will come in the form of an email to all those customers who have already signed up for one or more IFD540s but if you want to get a headstart on throwing your name into that hat, don’t hesitate to send an email to sjacobson@avidyne.com.

Wow, thanks much for the update.

That's a good question and one I don't know the answer to.  I asked the explicit question to our local FAA certification office and wait to hear back the response.  Will post update when I get it.

Any news?

Steve, Thank you for the update....

 

.

Jake,

Bravo.

It isn't perfect.  They pay him to go flying, but on the ground he has to put up with us.

Good to hear about the demo at SnF.

Hi Steve,

what is the schedule for the 540?

Tx

may we conclude august at the earliest?

P.s. we definitely appreciate all the hard work and opennes. We just want to understand where we are approximately

Edited by wsh - 16 Apr 2013 at 6:31pm

Steve, I'm not sure I share your optimism but it doesn’t matter;  it’s going to be what it’s going to be and its out of our control.  I know how its ilmost impossible to predict how long the FAA will take.  What I would be interested in hearing is the feedback from the “pilot program”.  Let’s call it a quick look from a customer’s point of view.  Would that be possible?

Tony,

I don't think "the FAA is back from the furloughs".  FAA flight controllers are back from furloughs, but it's not clear to me where the money came from.  I've seen some reports that it came from other FAA projects like airport improvements.  There could still be sequester impacts to non-flight control FAA functions.

"2.  We have scheduled FAA fam flights for week of 29 April;"

So... is this happening as planned?

Very good, keep it rollling.