Volume 8, Number 3     May/June 2000

Software Promises Enhanced Flight Safety

New software developed at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California shows promise for making air travel safer. It provides pilots, air traffic management, maintenance personnel and others constantly updated information about an aircraft and its surroundings.

The software, called the Ring Buffered Network Bus, is now a fledgling commercial product called the Data Turbine™. It offers a solution for how to meet the often-conflicting goals of providing high-performance data acquisition and quick access to those data by many users. The Data Turbine has become one of the enabling technologies now being developed for NASA's Aviation Safety Program.

Using this technology, entire fleets of aircraft may soon be able to communicate with each other and with ground-based facilities through computer networks. The technology also has the potential for enhancing the function of flight data recorders, known as black boxes, with Data Turbine-enabled communications networks. The software would maintain a history of on-board and ground-based information flow with participating users, allowing immediate access to information that may or may not be recoverable from a flight data recorder following an aircraft crash.

"The Data Turbine is a piece of the aviation safety puzzle," says Larry Freudinger, Dryden's lead engineer on collaborative computing environments. Freudinger developed the Data Turbine software. Dryden is expanding Data Turbine uses with development partner Creare, Inc., of Hanover, New Hampshire.

Advantages of this technology include a network-oriented infrastructure for managing information on an aircraft. Continuous updates of weather information to and from an aircraft can be integrated with engine health monitoring and other tools, which may automatically signal appropriate people when something indicates a potential safety hazard. The Data Turbine software is a network data server that is inserted between data sources and its users. It is analogous to a neuron, which has a mechanism to receive, store, process and forward signals from many sources to many destinations. A network of Data Turbine servers creates a type of digital nervous system that bonds applications and data sources together.

The software allows connected users to extract or input audio and video information instantaneously, no matter what type of computer they are using. It is efficient and cheap and allows different software packages to work collaboratively. The Data Turbine software can also separate information as well as integrate it. For example, a data stream could include information about sports, concerts and news. If someone wanted only news, he or she could get just the news using the software as well as receiving all three if desired. For researchers, this means that they can use one set of computer codes to collect information, another to analyze it and a third to report the results and use them collaboratively in an integrated way using a Data Turbine.

To demonstrate the utility of this technology, six Data Turbine servers will be used on NASA's DC-8 Airborne Science Flying Laboratory, in flight-test mission control centers and at remote sites to assist with flight research. A year from now, the DC-8's airborne network will be connected to the terrestrial network via a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The intercenter project team plans to place weather sensing, vehicle health monitoring and network protocol experiments on that network in the context of evolving a reliable software infrastructure for information sharing on a global scale, Freudinger said.

A grant from NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, has focused on information technology research and the data-sharing needs of future air transportation systems.

For more information, contact Larry Freudinger at Dryden Flight Research Center. 661/276-3142, larry.freudinger@dfrc.nasa.gov Please mention you read about it in Innovation.