Towards Automated Flight-Maneuver-Specific Fatigue Analysis

Structural health monitoring of aircraft is a necessary topic especially with aging fleets. In general, it means tracking the structural integrity and keeping the risk of missing the detection of hazardous cracks low. Traditionally the fatigue analyses from the collected data have been carried out in a flight-by-flight basis. However, simultaneous good-quality recordings of the most relevant flight parameters with the calculated fatigue damage synchronized with the recordings enable more thorough analysis. Using an adequate collection of time stamped flight parameter signals, this paper aims at analyzing actions inside flight missions. We introduce a procedure for flight maneuver identification which allows maneuver-specific fatigue assessment when timestamped fatigue information is available. The presented damage distributions for F-18 aircraft demonstrate the new ability to consider the influence of various maneuvers on the fatigue of different structural details.