An Innovative Structural Fatigue Monitoring Solution for General Aviation Aircraft

ABSTRACT: This article proposes a novel and effective solution for estimating fatigue life of General Aviation (GA) airframes using flight data produced by digital avionics systems, which are being installed or retrofitted into a growing number of GA aircraft. In the proposed implementation, a flight dynamics model is adopted to process the recorded flight data and to determine the dynamic loadings experienced by the aircraft. The equivalent loading cycles at fatigue-critical points of the primary structure are counted by means of statistical methods. For validation purposes, the developed app...