Modern aircraft require complex systems of complementary sensors for the achievement of precise and dynamic on-line flight measurements. For the computation, transmission and storage of sensor data a distributed information system is needed which has to respect hard real-time demands. In this paper the demands of an aircraft sensor system on the components of the distributed information system are analysed allowing the allocation and partitioning of the tasks to the resources. Simulation experiments are used to investigate the real-time behaviour of the whole information system, consisting of several RISC-processors, DRAMs and bus systems. The bus systems are divided into parallel and serial buses; the serial field bus system is realized by PROFIBUS. The real-time behaviour of PROFIBUS is additionally analysed by hardware experiments.