Portable maintenance aid instrument pack-improved weapon system diagnostics

False removals are costly and add to the logistics tail of every weapon system. Integrating portable maintenance aids (PMAs) and maintenance information systems into the test repertoire can help significantly; however, these solutions do little to augment the information available for system test and diagnosis. Adding conventional test instrumentation under PMA control would provide the additional information we seek; however, these hardware intensive solutions are typically large, heavy and expensive. VXI offers an opportunity to consolidate instrumentation into a convenient package; however VXI modules are not designed to meet the rigor associated with the MIL-PRF-28800 Class 1 environment. Moreover, the majority of VXI products provide a single function. Therefore many VXI modules are required to provide the needed functionality, resulting in an instrumentation package that is large and awkward to use at best and quite often just not useable on the flightline. This paper addresses false removals, the challenges involved in addressing this issue, and the solution that is being implemented on the RAH-66 Comanche Helicopter program. A powerful approach to instrumentation that is both powerful and useable, and the test techniques that have been developed to augment diagnostic capability on the flightline, are described.