Engineering notes from the bench and the range. Anonymized; reviewed by the customer before publication.
Most detect-and-avoid programs we are asked to verify have an encounter-set library that was built around what was easy to script, not around what the airworthiness authority needs to see. The investment that pays back the most is rebuilding the library against the operational design domain on day one.
The intervention-rate trend across a flight-test campaign is one of the more useful leading indicators of program risk. Almost every program we work with under-instruments the rate by a factor of two and gets surprised when the trend turns.
Run-time-assurance architectures are a real tool, not a get-out-of-verification card. We sketch the four assurance arguments a monitor-and-revert design has to support, and the two it usually fails on.
The clock-domain count on a modern multi-vehicle test card is higher than most data-engineering plans assume. A short field guide to what we now require before the first flight of a new test card.