Where's the beer? A paradigm shift in flight-line armament testing

Abstract

Air Force armament maintainers like their beer and they definitely love their beercans. Prior to loading live weapons on an aircraft, maintainers are required to verify that no stray voltage is present and that the firing signals are functioning properly. In the Air Force world, this is done with a small, battery-operated tester called an Armament Circuits Pre-Load Test Set (ACPTS), commonly referred to as a “beercan” due to its shape and size. The typical beercan is a rudimentary test set with few capabilities and limited performance. The beercan's function is to verify that there is no stray voltage on the critical firing lines (squibs), and to verify the presence of firing signals including magnitude and timing during a valid launch procedure. The typical beercan only has one or two measurement channels, necessitating the manual switching of various adapters to enable testing of multiple signals. The typical beercans also lack the ability to emulate weapon signals, precluding any effective “smart” weapons testing by beercans. If any type of fault is detected by the beercan, a different test set is required to troubleshoot and repair the fault. In the F-16 world, this is achieved by the 75501 tester and other aircraft have similar flight-line testers. These testers emulate the weapons and perform a complete test on the weapon system from the cockpit's Multi-Function Display (MFD) to the launch rails and are also capable of troubleshooting the faults. If the flight-line tester identifies a failure with the launcher or bomb rack, these are removed from the aircraft and taken to the shop for further testing by back-shop testers such as the 75501 (now SST). This test process requires three types of testers which in turn, complicates the maintenance logistics and increases maintenance costs. A new breed of beercans has been recently introduced to address this deficiency by improving the test capabilities of the beercan, thus eliminating the flight-line testers and simplifying the maintenance logistics while increasing performance and reducing test and maintenance time. This paper discusses the requirements of flight-line armament testers and introduces a universal beercan with capabilities previously unavailable for the flightline.