Recent Air Force innovation initiatives have spurred the test and evaluation community to re-evaluate all aspects of the flight test paradigm. Within the realm of flight test instrumentation, aircraft modification time was identified as a significant sink for both time and cost. This is largely due to the lengthy process of installing and/or removing large amounts of instrumentation, aka orange wire, throughout the aircraft. To combat this, several wireless instrumentation solutions are being developed. One such solution, dubbed the Distributed Acquisition Wireless Network (DAWN), was created with the aim of replacing large, long wire bundle runs from terminal aircraft locations, such as the wingtips and tail section, back to the centralized instrumentation hub near the center of the aircraft, with a wireless mesh network. This mesh network acts as a bulk wireless transport mechanism for instrumentation data collected in these remote aircraft locations. DAWN was previously briefed in 2018, and this presentation aims to update the T and E community on the progress, successes, failures, lessons learned, and our path forward with this type of instrumentation solution.
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