Angle-of-attack sensor analysis and calibration method for a heavy jet transport

This paper describes a method that has been used to install and calibrate angle-of-attack (AOA) vane sensors on out-of-production jet transport aircraft that have never been equipped with such sensors. The calibration process is accomplished without using a boom-mounted AOA sensor which is commonly used during new aircraft certification flight testing. Instead, a commercial AOA vane sensor is installed on the fuselage and then flight test data is collected under conditions that allow measurements of actual AOA using accelerometers and the aircraft attitude gyros. The flight data is analyzed to extract the actual AOA and generate the transformation that maps the output from the AOA vane sensor to actual AOA.