Innovative Method for Aircraft Gross Weight and Center of Gravity Estimation

An accurate, automated assessment of helicopter Gross Weight (GW) and Center of Gravity (CG) is critical for the determination of aircraft fatigue and life estimates since GW/CG affect static and dynamic characteristics of helicopters. Therefore GW and CG of a helicopter are valuable information in calculating reliable loads and remaining fatigue life. These in turn will assist the condition based maintenance systems used to enhance safety and reduce the operating cost of helicopters. An automated system for GW and CG will improve aircraft structural life estimation and performance characteristics, will relieve pilot"s burden of logging data, and will also improve situational awareness. To capture GW and CG changes continuously throughout the flight, advanced methods are required as conventional methods are not sufficient and prone to errors. Technical Data Analysis, Inc. (TDA) envisions a comprehensive solution based on a combination of physics based (deterministic) models and data driven (stochastic) models. TDA"s team believes that combining both methods will overcome each technique limitations and will take advantage of each method"s strengths. Therefore TDA"s team aims to develop a hybrid system that combines the powerful estimation capabilities of the Kalman Filter (KF) scheme with the strong learning capabilities of the Neural Network (NN).