Tue, Jun 22, 2010
Aircraft's First Flight With New Flight Control System
The Sky-Y, Alenia Aeronautica's UAS technological demonstrator,
has successfully accomplished its first flight with a Flight
Control System wholly developed by Alenia Aeronautica in
collaboration with Alenia SIA (Alenia Aeronautica's owned company).
The test flight was conducted at the Italian Air Force's air base
in Decimomannu, Sardinia.
Sky-Y UAS
During this test campaign Alenia Aeronautica will experiment the
new E-FCS (Experimental-FCS), which is a prototype of a system
including an avionic computer, several sensors (inertial, air data,
GPS) and electrical actuators for the primary and secondary flight
controls. The system complies with the recent aeronautical
certification rules and with the most advanced technical and
industrial directives for this kind of equipments, regarding both
hardware and software. As a matter of fact, the control laws
introducing the rationale for the remote and automated aircraft's
control have been developed entirely by Alenia Aeronautica.
The Sky-Y aircraft is at its fourth flight-test campaign and it
is envisaged it will complete its testing programme by the end of
July 2010, with 15 long-endurance flights. This is the first flight
campaign taking place at the Decimomannu air base in Sardinia,
thanks to the precious collaboration with the Ministry of Defence
and the Italian Air Force.
Alenia Aeronautica reaches another important step in pursuing
the wider project of the creation of a national industrial
capability, able to develop autonomously in Italy the innovative
unmanned systems and the related subsystems and technologies: the
current frontier of the twenty-first century aeronautical
products.
During this flight-test campaign Alenia Aeronautica will assess
also the correct integration on the aircraft of systems developed
by other Finmeccanica companies such as the EOST45, a high
performance passive Electro-Optical Surveillance and Tracking
system developed by SELEX Galileo, a new Wide-Band Data-Link
developed by SELEX Communications, a powerful and reliable
equipment for the satellite data-link of Telespazio, whose use has
been granted to Alenia Aeronautica, within a cooperation agreement,
by the Civil Protection Agency of the Piedmont Region.
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