AIRBUS Improves Flight Testing Efficiency

The AIRBUS flight test program is a key component of aircraft development. Every part in every possible configuration must be tested in as many scenarios as possible. This creates multiple types of data, all in different silos — plane configuration criteria, flight data criteria, flight event behaviors, crew reports, and other unstructured content criteria. Historically, each test flight required manual research into previous tests to create a set of specific requests, and the effort to leverage data to optimize those new flight tests was considerable.

While a lot of data was generated during testing, AIRBUS’ process to search within the data in order to simply retrieve a specific condition and its result was a slow, manual one. And, flight test environments are constantly changing, with a series of maneuvers done at specific locations, which meant that traditional data approaches couldn’t keep up with this complex data challenge.

AIRBUS needed to integrate all the test data from the multiple data sources to enable them to find a historical test that matched the exact parameters needed to support the specific parts and components they were testing. They then needed to be able to quickly search through existing flight data to see if a certain flight test had already been completed to reduce duplicating tests and speed the development of new tests.

With MarkLogic’s Data Hub Platform, they were able to integrate the diverse data, map those data points to the aircraft parts and components of each tested aircraft, and then search across that data to find test data with precise queries, including specific conditions, locations, components and temporal patterns in sensor data.