Lessons Learned For Application to Rotorcraft Structural Integrity Programs

Airworthiness for the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) programs will be guided by the Rotorcraft Structural Integrity Program (RSIP) standard, published as MIL-STD-3063. The United States Air Force (USAF) standard that helped to guide RSIP, the Aircraft Structural Integrity Program (ASIP), MIL-STD-1530, has been used by the USAF to guide airworthiness for their helicopter fleets for decades. Mercer Engineering Research Center (MERC) has been supporting these USAF helicopter ASIP programs for several years, often instantiating ASIP requirements on fleets not originally designed to those requirements. MERC believes vital opportunities exist in the early stages of new platforms to inject important lessons learned during the course of this support. For the purposes of this paper, these lessons learned will focus on three primary areas. These areas are 1) identifying and accessing data required for sustainment activities, 2) understanding failure modes of the data and how to handle them appropriately, and 3) efficiently storing and processing of ever-increasing amounts of data. Ultimately, continuous and purposeful communication between development and force management communities is vital to positioning these new fleets as early as possible for the longest phase in their life cycles.