NASA Armstrong Flight Research Facility
August 27 – December 14, 2018
Goals of your project/s:
The goals of my internship were to integrate a new air data probe onto the PRANDTL-D 3c aircraft, lead the logistics required for flying the airplane, and perform some debugging on the onboard data acquisition computer.
During the first half of my internship, I was working quite a bit with the data acquisition computer that the aircraft uses to log data from many different onboard sensors. There was some old code that had to be improved. First, I had to learn quite a bit more about the C coding language and how the computer communicated with the onboard sensors. Meanwhile, I was preparing a new air data probe to be mounted to the airplane. This involved taking the air data probe into the lab, creating models on the output of the sensors, and then implementing these models into the computer’s post processing code. During the second half of my internship, my role switched to handling mostly flight logistics.
Our goal was to fly three airplanes simultaneously in a formation flight. To do this safely, the team that I was on had to answer many questions: which plane launches first? how many people are needed to launch the airplanes? where should the launch crew be situated on the ground? My role within this group was facilitating communication and helping ready the airplanes for the flight.
Did you acheive your goals? What were the results and conclusions?
Describe positive lessons learned from this experience:
Describe negative lessons learned from this experience: