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The past twenty years have seen tremendous changes in the Avionics display and flight deck lighting due to the application of solid-state LED (light emitting diode) light sources and LCDs (liquid crystal displays). These advances significantly benefit the customer and pilot users when integrated correctly. This paper discusses recommended practices and guidance given in SAE ARP 4103 for modern Avionics flight deck lighting systems to satisfy the end user and obtain certification. SAE ARP 4103 Flight Deck Lighting for Commercial Transport Aircraft has recently been revised to keep up with the Avionics state-of-the-art and add clarification where needed. ARP 4103 contains recommended Avionics flight deck lighting design and performance criteria to ensure prompt and accurate readability and visibility, color identification and discrimination of needed information under all expected ambient lighting and electrical power conditions. For additional details, see the actual ARP 4103.

Electroimpact Automatic Fiber Placement (AFP) machines lay-up composite parts by accurately placing carbon fiber tow (strips of impregnated carbon fiber) on a mould. In order to achieve high accuracy at high speeds, the processes of feeding and cutting tows must be tuned. Historically, the tuning has been a time-consuming, manual process. This paper will present a methodology to replace manual measurements with an automated laser, improve measurement speed by an order of magnitude, improve accuracy from +/? 0.020? (manual) to +/? 0.015? (laser), and eliminate human error. Presenter Joshua Cemenska, Electroimpact Inc.

Many of the certification regulations in 14 CFR Part 25 are by design, broad and as such, can be subject to large differences in the interpretation of what constitutes adequate compliance. Advisory Circulars (AC's) were developed for many of the regulations to assist industry, as well as certification personnel, with what is considered an acceptable, but not the only means, of compliance. However, there are many regulations where no advisory material is available. In these cases, the “acceptable means” of compliance can vary to a greater degree among the various aircraft certification offices. This difficulty is aggravated as new applicants and regulatory personnel enter the certification field. Recent discussions and interpretations on the usage of an avionic unit's mean time between failure or MTBF for its detectable faults as the basic repair rate for undetected or latent faults, is a subject area where no significant advisory material exists.

Water recovery from wastewater is essential for the success of long-term missions to the Moon and Mars and human crew operations during explorations of these planets. Honeywell International and the team consisting of Thermodistillation Co. ( Kyiv, Ukraine) and NASA JSC Crew and Thermal Systems Division are developing an efficient wastewater processing subsystem that is based on centrifugal vacuum distillation. This subsystem will be tested at the NASA JSC Advanced Water Recovery Systems Development Facility. The Wastewater Processing Cascade Distillation Subsystem (CDS) utilizes an innovative and proven multi-stage thermodynamic process to produce purified water efficiently, and its rotary centrifugal design provides gas/liquid phase separation and liquid transport (pumping) under microgravity conditions.

Many electronic parts have life cycles that are shorter than the life cycle of the product they are in. Life cycle mismatches caused by the obsolescence of electronic parts can result in significantly sustainment costs for long life systems. In particular, avionics often encounters part obsolescence problems before being fielded and nearly always experience part obsolescence problems during their field life. This paper presents a methodology for determining the optimum design refresh (redesign) schedule for long field life electronic systems based on forecasted electronic part obsolescence and a mix of obsolescence mitigation approaches ranging from lifetime buys to part substitution.

Although the plastic ball-grid-array (PBGA) is accepted in the commercial and industrial community as a viable packaging technology, their acceptance in an environmentally harsh aerospace application has been limited. The limitation is due to a perceived reliability and durability risk most aerospace industries are unwilling to accept. However, with the abundant availability of PBGA packages, and a limited source of comparable substitutes, the aerospace industry is faced with a dilemma. The aerospace industry does not drive the semiconductor market, since the volumes for semiconductor devices are low in comparison with other high-volume semiconductor consumer industry. Therefore, the aerospace industry is faced with validating the viability of PBGA packaging technology for harsh environmental aerospace applications. This paper will discuss a formal method for validating PBGA packaging technology for environmentally harsh aerospace applications.