Intermediate level maintenance Fibre Channel testing

Fibre Channel (FC) has been identified as the next avionic communication architecture to complement, and in some cases, replace an over-burdened MIL-STD-1553 architecture. Despite the availability of FC commercial standards, a. common maintenance approach has not surfaced among the multitude of military avionic manufacturers. As a result, there is no clear definition of intermediate level maintenance testing of FC communication architectures as the definition is applied to military avionic equipment. This paper identifies the FC intermediate level maintenance challenges and formulates a viable solution for intermediate level testing that does not exist today. This maintenance solution transfers commercial practices into a military environment by establishing a basic support capability through the use of standardized commercial equipment and processes and then modifies those processes to build a generic, military test methodology.