Usage monitoring for Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) equipped aircraft entails determining the actual usage of a component over time. This allows the actually usage/damage from a flight to be assigning to that component instead of the more conservative, worst case usage. By measuring the actually usage on the aircraft, the life of components can be extended, resulting in reduced maintenance cost. Alternatively, for aggressively flown aircraft, safety is maintained in that a component usage may be "consumed" to a greater extent than expected by the original flight spectrum data. Usage Monitoring requires an accurate representation of regime (e.g. Regime Recognition (RR)), where regime is the flight profile of the aircraft at each instant of flight time. For each regime, there is a usage assigned for each component that is life limited (e.g. accumulated damage over time). For example, the damage accumulated for a component would be higher if the aircraft is undergoing a high G maneuver vs. straight and level flight.
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