Abstract:
The ability to monitor gross weight (GW) of operational rotorcraft would result in increased safety and reduced maintenance costs. Due to these potential benefits, the aerospace community has investigated a number of approaches for monitoring GW. Heretofore, each approach has had inherent strengths and weaknesses that make them incomplete solutions by themselves for rotorcraft. For this reason, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation has developed and demonstrated a novel system referenced herein as Hybrid GW Monitoring, which leverages the strengths of several approaches while significantly mitigating their weaknesses. This paper summarizes the development of the Hybrid GW Monitor, validation of its performance on flight test data, and lessons learned from its application to 500,000 flight hours of fleet data.