Steps In MTP Post-Campaign Data Analysis

MJ Mahoney

11. Determine Flight Levels that RCs should be calculated at

Go to the MTPbin Tools form (below) and select the Run Pgm tab.

Figure 1. The MTPbin Tools form

On the Flight Dates to Process frame, select the Default All button to select all flights in the default mission NUM file (e.g. \Setup\PAVE_NUM.txt) in the mission folder. If you don't want to use all the flights, select each flight you want to remove and do so with the Remove button. Then use the Save button to save this list for future use; it will be saved in \Setup\Mission_NUM_batch.txt in the mission folder.

Next, in the Level Flight Legs frame set default parameters for:

the maximum flight altitude(ZpMax)(integer km)
the bin size(ZpBin)
the maximum allowed altitude excursion for a level flight leg (dZpMax)
the maximum allowed pitch excursion during a level flight leg (dPitchMax),
the maximum allowed absolute pitch to be considered (ABS(Pitch)Max, and
the minimum time needed to define a level flight leg (dUTmin).

Finally, press the Get button to collect the level flight statistics. They will be written to a file named Mission_LevelFlight.txt in the mission folder, and should be imported into an Excel workbook for analysis. Use a previous campaign as a template: either pre-AVE or PAVE, as these were the first to use this technique.

Figure 2. A pressure altitude histogram for the 11 PAVE DC-8 flights. The same figure in kft is available here.

Based on the peaks on the histogram is Figure 2, it was decided to calculate RCs at 14 pressure altitudes:
kft        km
41.2    12.56
40       12.19
39   11.89
38       11.58
37       11.28
36   10.97
35       10.67
34       10.36
25         7.62
10         3.05
5           1.52
2           0.61
1           0.30
0.03      0.01

The column of numbers labelled km should be entered into the MISSION_FLA.txt file in the mission Setup folder.

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