Applying Model Based Safety Assessment for Aircraft Landing Gear System Certification

Abstract

New aircraft certification includes Systems Safety Assessment and Flight Testing for verifying compliance to various certification standards, noise testing, reliability testing, human factors analysis and qualitative assessments of flying qualities. The Model-Based Systems Engineering methodology has demonstrated its usefulness and practicality for performance validation of aircraft critical systems like the flight control systems prior to the start of actual qualification testing or flight testing. Use of model based methodology can be applied to failure and safety assessment tasks and certification process. Initial adaptation of MBSE was limited to aircraft systems related to electronics, avionics and software based components. There are some challenges in implementing Model-Based Safety Analysis to mechanical and electro-mechanical based systems like aircraft wheel braking system and nose steering system. MBSA promotes and supports virtual flight testing and is a powerful tool for verifying design and safety related malfunctions particularly for those failures conditions where it may not be possible to test these during the regular flight test regime.