When a series of storms swept through southern New York State in 2011, the BAE Systems facility in Johnson City was flooded with 16 million gallons of water. The resulting water damage destroyed computer systems, documentation, and entire work areas, threatening to derail numerous ongoing projects. These projects included developing flight control computer (FCC) software for the world’s first fly-by-wire (FBW) midsized business jet.
Model-Based Design helped the BAE Systems team get the project back on track and certify it to DO-178B Level A.
“In the aftermath of these severe weather events, Model-Based Design absolutely helped us stay on schedule,” says Mike Weaver, senior principal systems engineer at BAE Systems. “Because we lost much of our test equipment in the flood, running simulations in Simulink was a tremendous advantage, particularly when we used test vectors provided by our customer. Simulink enabled us to verify and integrate our designs on the desktop before we generated code.”