Gripen E - Oppdatering - AIN

December 2, 2016

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Saab Postpones Gripen E First Flight—for Good Reason The first flight of the Gripen E fighter has been postponed from late this year until the second quarter of 2017. Saab said that the delay is caused by its deliberate decision to fully qualify an innovative avionics and software system before getting airborne. But the Swedish company said that the test aircraft designated 39-8 has now done engine runs, only nine weeks after power-on, compared with 10 to 18 months in previous Saab developments. High-speed taxi tests are due soon. “We are handling the one million lines of code of a new fighter in a logical way,” said Lars Ydreskog, Saab’s head of operations. The company has designed a scalable and hardware-independent software platform that it has named Distributed Integrated Modular Avionics (DIMA). It is qualifying software to the DD178C standard for commercial aircraft, even though the Gripen E will be limited to military certification. “This is our business decision; it saves time and money, and we can re-use up to 98 percent of the initial qualification software in future applications, which is unprecedented,” Ydreskog claimed. Read More