Copernicus Technology carried out several successful data analysis and IFD testing projects on the UK Royal Air Force's CH-47 Chinook fleet for the MOD DE&S Chinook Project Team.   

Using our NOVA data exploitation approach we successfully analysed Maintenance & Availability data to identify 'rogue' components, trends impacting 'high hit' systems on Mission Success, Downtime & Operational Reliability; and issues affecting repair success rates.  

With NOVA having identified rogue systems and components across the fleet we then applied intermittent fault detection and integrity testing using VIFD™ portable test equipment to isolate the root causes of underlying availability issues.   

IFD testing of a safety-critical systems' wiring and rogue LRUs led to the following improvements:

• Several build and component integrity faults were detected by IFD testing.  The Depth repair bay revised their maintenance procedures in light of the findings, which instantly led to increased Time-On-Wing for this type of LRU across the fleet.

• The same system's wiring was VIFD-tested on several aircraft.  Multiple intermittent fauts and high resistances were pinpointed straight away, with the entire tsting taking only 25% of the time needed when using traditional methods.  Once the faults found were repaired the operational reliability increased on all the aircraft tested.

• Independent testing of another system, in support of a safety investigation, pinpointed multiple faults in the instrument panels and cabling.  The customer concluded that the findings of this test would "undoubtedly save lives".

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