In-flight Lightning Damage Assessment System (ILDAS): Diagnostic performance assessment with in-fight lightning data

The results described in this paper form part of ILDAS-2 project launched by Airbus, with Airbus Group Innovations and NLR, as a follow-up to ILDAS-1 FP6 EU project. The goal of the programme is to develop an operational system for aircraft in-flight lightning strike diagnoses in terms of current waveform reconstruction and attachment points identification. Onboard hardware manages lightning detection and triggers the synchronous magnetic field recording with eight fuselage sensors. This dataset is the input of ILDAS EM toolkit: the software that performs lightning events diagnoses. The full system has been tested in May 2013 on an A380 during a flight test campaign. This paper addresses the validation of ILDAS numerical tool with in-flight data. Examples of diagnoses are presented with the methodology of assessment of these predictions and a global overview of the system performances during this campaign. The capacity of the system to provide valuable information likely to support maintenance actions is evaluated.