Aerospace and defense digital thread
Aircraft certification
Airworthiness certification is critically important in aerospace and defense. Learn how to efficiently connect data and systems, maximize physical testing and more confidently prove compliance by adopting a connected verification and certification approach.
Certify the newest aircraft more efficiently
Integrate an aircraft certification plan with the program plan from the start to establish continuous visibility, shorten cycle time and reduce risk. Collect and connect data for traceability and smooth data exchange. Leverage a comprehensive digital twin to provide faster, more accurate access to all verification and certification data.
Build requirements into your certification plan
Gain a fully traceable chain of data, reduce reliance on physical testing, discover problems early to avoid unnecessary re-testing, easily prove compliance and ultimately reduce risks to accelerate time to certification. Using our solutions customers are seeing improvements:
Reliably managed engineering changes
Leverage our aircraft requirements management solution to oversee engineering changes. (Fokker Services)
Reduce cycle time by 2 weeks
Design high-quality, certifiable aircraft while reducing cycle time calculations, test and costs. (Lisa Airplanes)
Eliminate need for paper documentation
Establish a traceable chain of data that collects and connects compliance artifacts in real time to see up to a 100% reduction in paper documentation. (Fokker Services)
Digitally transform your aircraft certification process
Link people, data and global processes and introduce automation into planning, scheduling, executing and managing aircraft certification. Streamline certification for new type designs.
Explore the three paths our solutions cover to help you achieve accurate and efficient airworthiness compliance.
By connecting regulatory requirements to a digital model — starting at the earliest stage (systems engineering requirements) — you build verification and certification deliverables into daily design, analysis and testing workflows. By integrating verification testing and certification into the overall program plan, you maximize the applicability of your physical testing to show compliance.
The model-based approach to data management automatically enables traceability because compliance artifacts are collected and connected in real time, instead of manually gathering and collecting data after verification and testing activities. Data is able to be traced forward and backward across the certification process. A verification process that is concurrent with design helps you reduce risks, reduce effort and shorten cycle times because all stakeholders are using current and correct data.
By keeping all elements for the proof of compliance in context in the comprehensive digital twin, you can reduce the time and costs needed to produce the engineering data for verification testing. This is true whether these elements are based on comparison or similarities with the previous programs, virtual test-based or physical test-based.
Improve certification to reduce costs and cycle times
Savings in testing costs
Eliminate expensive testing while still proving airworthiness. (TLG Aerospace)
Reduction in flight test hours
Get innovative, airworthy products to market faster. (Airbus Helicopters)
Days to complete a full modal survey test
Generate accurate test results within shorter timeframes. (DLR)
Aerospace engineering services company uses Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to reduce aircraft certification cost
Company:TLG Aerospace
Industry:Aerospace & defense
Location:Seattle, Washington, United States
Siemens Software:Simcenter 3D Solutions, Simcenter STAR-CCM+
We can now bid on projects that have greater scope, be more competitive, pass on the savings to our customers and do much more with our dollar.
Explore our resource library
Integrate certification into product development to prove regulatory compliance faster, reducing cycle times and cost.
Solutions for connected verification and certification
Aircraft requirements management
Aircraft performance engineering
Service planning & management
Electronic systems design
Multidomain enterprise BOM
Cloud SaaS PLM for aerospace and defense
Frequently asked questions
A successful aircraft program manages the business, customer and regulatory requirements, with the design and engineering being driven by all, and the regulatory requirements serving as the minimum acceptable in terms of safety and performance. The Siemens Xcelerator solution helps connect the digital thread running through regulatory requirements, design, test and certification documentation, increasing the chances of regulatory approval.
You can accelerate the aircraft certification process by doing the following:
- Efficiently and quickly understanding and deriving business, customer and regulatory requirements
- Assigning them to the appropriate subsystems and components
- Designing and simulating those subsystems virtually to minimize risk to “for credit” certification tests
- Verifying those subsystems and components meet those requirements
The connected verification and certification solutions within the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio can help engineers and other stakeholders consume, analyze and manage all requirements, including any applicable federal aviation regulations (FARs), regulatory guidance/advisories and applicable industry/trade and professional society specifications. When you capture and manage data on an open, flexible digital backbone, you provide an authoritative source of truth and access to current, real-time data.
From a design compliance demonstration standpoint, traceability is necessary as a legal regulatory requirement. It allows you to track hierarchies in every direction — from requirements to physical parts to supporting data elements — to understand when changes are necessary, what is affected and how it impacts the function/performance of the engineered system. For production conformity and aircraft airworthiness, traceability in aircraft certification is important for safety and quality reasons. If you encounter an issue during any phase of the manufacture or operation of an aircraft, traceability provides a means to research the root cause of the problem and identify the affected aircraft.
The Siemens Xcelerator portfolio configuration control capabilities can maximize traceability of design data, in addition to efficient quality and manufacturing processes. This minimizes the chances of configuration escapes to improve customer-felt quality and safety.
The Siemens Xcelerator portfolio has the breadth and depth of solution capabilities to help you with every part of your program – requirements, conceptual design, preliminary design, critical design, final design and across the rest of the product lifecycle.
When you adopt our connected verification and certification solutions to digitally transform your processes, you integrate certification with product development at the earliest stage, gain a fully traceable chain of data, reduce reliance on physical testing, discover problems early to avoid unnecessary re-testing, instill confidence that you can easily prove compliance and ultimately reduce risks. Together, this helps build trust with regulatory authorities and accelerates achieving certification.
Our solutions are trusted by the most recognizable names in aerospace and defense as well as startups entering the industry. We are helping commercial, defense and space companies across the globe successfully manage their programs.
Learn more
Watch
On-demand webinar | Prove compliance with numerical analysis supported by physical testing
On-demand webinar | Avoid issues that delay aircraft certification
Listen
Podcast | Why fulfilling airworthiness requirements means going digital
Podcast | Verification and certification through digitalization
Read
White paper | Digital certification management
White paper | Achieve airworthiness compliance more efficiently
Ebook | Five ways digitalization streamlines aircraft certification