Chinthala Rupasri, Prof. S. Varadarajan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23034435

Flight Data Recorders (FDRs) and Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVRs) are the standard systems for capturing aircraft data, designed primarily for post-flight and accident analysis. They do not provide a continuous real-time monitoring channel to the ground. This paper presents the system design and functional simulation of an Interfacing and Ingestion Module (IIM) for the BLUE BOX real-time aircraft telemetry system. The IIM acts as a non-intrusive, parallel monitoring lane alongside the existing FDR/CVR systems. The proposed module accepts flight data, cockpit audio, and cockpit video as inputs and processes them through a chain that includes engineering-unit conversion, CRC-16 error detection, timestamp generation, priority handling, FIFO buffering, and packetization. The system is modelled and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. Functional validation results covering controlled error injection, CRC-16 error detection, ground-station data recovery, and throughput measurement confirm that the proposed IIM processing chain operates correctly and provides a viable architecture for real-time aircraft data monitoring.

BLUE BOX, Interfacing and Ingestion Module (IIM), aircraft data acquisition, real-time monitoring, CRC-16, error detection, MATLAB/Simulink, FDR, CVR, flight data recorder

This paper presented the system-level design and MATLAB/Simulink simulation of the Interfacing and Ingestion Module (IIM) for the BLUE BOX real-time aircraft telemetry system. The IIM provides a non-intrusive, parallel monitoring path alongside existing FDR/CVR recording systems. The implemented processing chain — covering acquisition, engineering-unit conversion, CRC-16 validation, timestamping, priority handling, FIFO buffering, packetization, and ground-station recovery — was validated through four functional simulation tests. CRC-16 error detection was confirmed, ground-station data recovery was demonstrated, and throughput measurement produced a measurable output. These results confirm the functional feasibility of the proposed BLUE BOX IIM architecture and establish a simulation baseline for subsequent hardware development and ARINC-429 protocol-level integration.

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Chinthala Rupasri, Prof. S. Varadarajan (2026). Design and Simulation of an ARINC-429 Interfacing and Ingestion Module for Real-Time Aircraft Data Acquisition: System Overview and Functional Validation. International Journal of Engineering and Techniques, 12(5), 297–301. ISSN: 2395-1303. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23034435