A report on the flight of Delta II´s redundant inertial flight control assembly (RIFCA)

AlliedSignal´s Redundant Inertial Flight Control Assembly (RIFCA) is a practical, cost-effective, fully fault tolerant inertial system currently used on the Boeing Delta II launch vehicle. The RIFCA program is now in the production phase, providing flight hardware for the Delta II program, and has successfully flown on 17 Delta II launches to date. RTFCA measures vehicle inertial angular rates and linear accelerations, and provides for the computational processing of guidance, navigation, flight controls and mission sequencing data. This paper describes key elements of the RIFCA top-level system design, including redundancy concepts, hardware and software, all integrated to provide a fail-op capability. In addition, it summarizes RIFCA system level performance capability and Boeing Delta II launch vehicle mission accuracy based on actual system/mission launch data. This paper also discusses planned enhancements to RIFCA