C-17 production automated verification equipment (PAVE)

Manually testing aircraft functions during factory assembly has been a costly and time-consuming task. In addition, this problem has been compounded by the fact that deliverable cockpit avionics are required during testing and are therefore exposed to the damaging production environment longer. The C-17 aircraft currently requires 48 on-aircraft test procedures (OATP) to verify system operations and airworthiness prior to customer delivery. As a result, the current manual test method equates to over 15,000 test hours per aircraft. This paper discusses the implementation of the Production Automated Verification Equipment (PAVE). PAVE is an automated aircraft test system which, by emulating various cockpit LRUs and test procedures, automates the current manually intensive OATP testing.