A Paradise View Press Title
Flight Test:
The Discipline
A comprehensive exploration of the basic tenets of flight test as a discipline and profession.
“To design a flying machine is nothing. To build it is not much. But to test it is everything.” — Ferdinand Ferber
Peter Tyson
7
Steps of the Scientific Method
3
Principles: Safe · Efficient · Effective
80+
Years of Naval Aviation Flight Test Experience
What Is This Book?
There is an incredibly important step between design and operational use. What leaves the mind of the designer must be discovered, verified, characterized, and validated. Without this, we have no certainty that the system designed and built matches the designer’s intent.
In the field of aviation, when it comes to testing systems, air vehicles, and all the accompanying equipment, enter the Flight Test Team. These professionals are the ones who take the completed design and develop it further into the system that the end-user needs.
Flight Test: The Discipline describes the people, resources, and processes that support Flight Test, starting with Test Planning, continuing through Test Execution, and finishing with Test Reporting. The book is full of specific aviation-related examples. However, the fundamental discipline of Aviation Flight Test applies to any field.
Whether you are testing, evaluating, or experimenting with any system in any technology area, this book gives confidence, context, and connections for the language, best practices, and lessons learned from Flight Test.
What the Book Covers
| Section | Topics |
|---|---|
| Introduction to Flight Test | History, basics, levels of flight test, the goal of flight test, pillars of success |
| The Scientific Method & Flight Test I | The need for flight test · Rigors of planning · Making a prediction |
| Test Planning | The written test plan · Test hazard analysis · Risk management · Project management |
| The Scientific Method & Flight Test II | Test execution · Pre-event brief · Post-event debrief · Analyzing results |
| Test Reporting | Drawing conclusions · Deficiency categories · Constructing a logical argument · Report formats |
Who This Book Is For
Written for the professionals who stand between design and deployment — the men and women who find out whether the thing actually works.
Flight Test Engineers at every level of experience. Test pilots preparing for or transitioning out of formal test pilot school. Program managers who need to understand what the test team is doing and why it costs what it costs. Systems engineers working on acquisition programs. And anyone whose professional world involves evaluating whether a complex system does what it is supposed to do — in aviation or in any other field.
The fundamentals of flight test apply to any system, any domain, any organization that takes a designed product and must determine whether it does what the designer intended and whether the right thing was built in the first place.