Mission Planner
This is a desktop application used by multiple models of military helicopters to create mission plans that can be loaded onto the aircraft. Pilots or crew members can enter their comms, flight plans, cargo, crew, etc., and that data is written to a card in the format required by the specific airfraft. That card can be loaded onto the aircraft so the pilots have all of their pre-planned mission data loaded in the cockpit. This saves a lot of time compared to entering that data via the aircraft's displays. Cards can be read back into the application to review post-mission data.
Technologies
Java, Python, Eclipse RCP, H2, Hibernate, Maven, Jenkins, Matlab
My Contributions
I touched many pieces of the application, including:
- Flight planning
- Mission card reading/writing
- Weight & balance calculations
- Flight performance calculations
- General UI development
Flight Planning
One of my primary focuses was flight planning, and the performance calculations that go along with that. I made sure that the application was producing results that matched what was expected by comparing against calculations provided by the aircraft’s engineers. This involved writing robust tests that ensured my algorithms were correct for all possible scenarios.
Debugging
A big pain point that we faced was debugging the written binary files for flight plans. I wrote a Python script that parsed the binary data into a human-readable format, which allowed my team and the aircraft’s engineers to better understand the data that was in the files, and more quickly pinpoint what was causing any given problem.