Honeywell FLASH fiber optic motherboard evaluations

Abstract

The use of fiber optic data transmission media can make significant contributions in achieving increasing performance and reduced life cycle cost requirement placed on commercial and military transport aircraft. For complete end-to-end fiber optic transmission, photonics technologies and techniques need to be understood and applied internally to the aircraft line replaceable units (LRUs) as well as externally on the interconnecting aircraft cable plant. During a portion of the Honeywell contribution to Task 2A on the Fly-by-Light Advanced System Hardware (FLASH) program, evaluations were done on a fiber optic transmission media implementation internal to a Primary Flight Control Computer (PFCC). The PFCC internal fiber optic transmission media implementation included a fiber optic backplane, an optical card-edge connector, and an optical source/detector coupler/installation. The performance of these optical media components was evaluated over typical aircraft environmental stresses of temperature, vibration, and humidity. These optical media components represent key technologies to the complete end-to-end fiber optic transmission capability on commercial and military transport aircraft. The evaluations and technical readiness assessments of these technologies will enable better perspectives on productization of fly-by-light systems requiring their utilizations.