Custom Test Systems for the Aerospace / Defense Industry2026-06-08T17:21:40-04:00

Aerospace Test Systems | Defense Test Systems

Custom Test Equipment for Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing

  • Over 300 aero-def test solutions delivered

  • NI Integration Partner

You’re risk averse and your customers expect a high level of rigor because your products are mission-critical.

With over 300 aero-def test solutions delivered, our aero-def expertise is focused on test system development for mission-critical components and sub-systems.

We’ve designed and developed test systems for many types of LRUs and subcomponents used in aerospace and defense applications. For example: flight surface actuators, ECUs via emulation of connected hardware, EO/IR imaging focused on FPA/ROIC electronics, hydraulic valves, gas valves, and others that require rigorous, traceable testing.

How we can help: our capabilities & expertise

Types of Aerospace Test Systems Viewpoint Develops

Flight Surface Actuator Test Systems

What do they do?

  • Exercise the actuator to check expected range of motion, positioning accuracy, maximum speed, and frequency response

What’s distinctive?

  • Supplemental hardware is needed to drive the actuator. This hardware is typically hydraulic but can also have an electric drive component. The test system needs to control and/or monitor this hardware. This hardware must be sized carefully or it may limit the actuator capabilities.
  • These systems are used in testing actuated flight surface control for aircraft wings, rudders, and elevators; movable rocket fins, canards, and thrust vector nozzles; and missile movable fins and thrust nozzles.

Mechanical Durability Test Systems

What do they do?

  • New designs of mechanical components, such as bearings, actuators, valves, and other “parts that move” must be tested for wear and tear.
  • Vibration, temperature, strain, displacement, pressure, and lubricant contamination are common measurements made during the long-term testing of mechanical components.
  • These test systems usually also control the conditions to which the part is subjected.

What’s distinctive?

  • Data acquisition occurs over days or even months.
  • The environmental conditions to which the part is subject can be continuous and/or cyclic, such as raising / lowering the temperature or increasing / decreasing the rotation rate.
  • Continuous or periodic data collection schemes are used to assess the behavior during this HALT/HASS testing.

Wind Tunnel Test Systems

What do they do?

  • Testing models of aircraft, engine, missile, drone, and other objects that move through gases (e.g. air) to assess their performance across wide ranges of airflow speed, pressure, and temperature.
  • Data is collected from sensors that measure forces, moments, air velocity, and temperature at multiple points on the model. Environmental data within the tunnel is also collected.

What’s distinctive?

  • Data acquisition from large number of channels, some at 100s of samples per second (S/s) and some at 10s of thousands of S/s.
  • Tests are expensive, so signal conditioning of sensor outputs and data calibration are critical for accurate measurements.
  • Control of the tunnel environmental conditions is often part of the test system to provide various sets of steady state or variable flow across a range of air pressure and temperature.

Turbine Blade Test Systems

What do they do?

  • The huge number of blades used in modern jet aircraft turbines are inspected against various requirements such as dimensional accuracy, cracks and voids, and blocked cooling holes, as well as other material defects.

What’s distinctive?

  • Machine vision automated testing is replacing manual methods for detection of cracks, voids, and blocked cooling holes.
  • For internal void detection, eddy currents, ultrasound, X-ray, and other methods are moving that way as well, using either vision or time-based signal analysis.

FPA/ROIC Imaging Test Systems

What do they do?

  • The Focal Plane Array (FPA) imaging sensor and Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC) electronics used in EO/IR products digitize and output the digital signals sent downstream to the image processing components.
  • Testing comprises verification of the signals output from the FPA/ROIC or emulation of those signals for testing the downstream image processing electronics. These Catch and Pitch test systems are beneficial in simplifying the testing of an otherwise long chain of digital signals paths.

What’s distinctive?

  • Massive amounts of data at high bit rates are common in today’s digital imaging systems. Test systems must handle throughput needs upwards of GBs per second and TBs of image data storage.
  • The test systems must manage different configurations of data taps being output by the FPA/ROIC components, from different numbers of taps to bit width per tap to readout direction (up/down, left/right).
  • FPGAs are used for acquiring (for verification) and/or output (for emulation).

RADAR Test Systems

What do they do?

  • RADAR signals are digitized and post-processed for verification of quality and correctness.
  • Signals can be generated for emulation of downstream processing through channel simulation and fault injection.
  • MIMO systems must maintain precise timing to eliminate phasing errors between channels.

What’s distinctive?

  • High-rate analog digitizers or output are needed often with high-dynamic range.
  • These Record and Playback systems are often combined with other hardware components such as downconverters or upconverters to move the analog signals into a frequency range that is compatible with the digital hardware.

Want more proof points?  Check out the AeroDef case studies below.

These case studies describe some of the test systems we have delivered. The test stands (or test rigs) combine hardware and software used to automate the rigorous procedures needed to verify and validate mission critical products.

Transonic Wind Tunnel Test System Upgrade

Transonic Wind Tunnel Test System Upgrade Improved Reliability, Reduced Stress, and New Tools People Want to Use. Client - Calspan (tunnel image courtesy of Calspan) Challenge Calspan operates a transonic wind tunnel capable of continuous Mach-speed testing a wide range of aircraft designs. The overall test system was comprised of three subsystems that were all state of art at the time of design, over 20 years ago, but components were either obsolete or soon becoming so. [...]

Selecting replacement hardware for an obsolete test system

Selecting replacement hardware for an obsolete test system A disaster hits – repair to meet schedule, and then upgrade after Client – A major aerospace company Challenge Our client’s design validation test system was about 10 years old. They realized that the NI hardware in the test system was soon to be obsolete and they would have to upgrade it someday. That day came sooner than expected when an issue in the test cell [...]

Manufacturing Test System – Aircraft turbine blade quality inspection

Manufacturing Test System – Aircraft turbine blade quality inspection Improving quality by detecting blocked holes in aircraft turbine blades with an automated test system Client - Large aerospace company Challenge Fuel-fed aircraft turbines run extremely hot. At very high temperatures, a turbine’s blades suffer a shorter life span than if run at cooler temperatures. Consequently, turbine manufacturers put cooling holes in the blades to lower the blade temperature during operation. These holes carry [...]

Automated production test of EO/IR imaging subsystem

Automated production test of EO/IR imaging subsystem Assessing quality of mission-critical electronics for imaging Increased throughput by automated signal skew adjustment and pixel verification Client - Worldwide supplier of products for aerospace and defense Challenge Our client wanted a test system that would significantly increase production rates for a very specialized focal plane array (FPA) and associated readout integrated circuit (ROIC) electronics. In broad strokes, the system needed to support the following: Increase production [...]

Replacing Wire-wrap Boards with Software, FPGAs, and Custom Signal Conditioning

Replacing Wire-wrap Boards with Software, FPGAs, and Custom Signal Conditioning Electronic components of fielded systems were aging out Reverse engineering effort converted wire wrap boards to FPGA-based I/O Client - Amentum - A supplier for Military Range System Support Challenge Amentum (www.amentum.com) supports a decades-old system deployed in the early 1980s. While the mechanical subsystems were still functioning, the wire-wrapped discrete logic and analog circuitry was having intermittent problems. Systems designed and built decades ago [...]

Custom FlexRIO Adaptor Module supports HIL Test Upgrade

Custom FlexRIO Adaptor Module supports HIL Test UpgradeA custom-COTS approach reduces cost and delivery time. Client - Major National Research Lab Challenge Our client has a client (the end-user) for which they developed an HIL test system several years prior. Parts were obsolete and the system needed an upgrade. The prior system had many custom-designed electronic components which could not be replaced without a complete redesign. Consequently, our client wanted to use COTS. However, one device needed [...]

High-Speed Digital Subsystem Emulator

High-Speed Digital Subsystem Emulator Client: A large company involved in C4ISR At maximum throughput, the AEDIS systems needed to consume and produce more than about 800 MB/s/slot. Background A large company involved in C4ISR was developing a system for a new high-speed digital sensor device. Viewpoint was contracted to build a test system used in design validation and ultimately endurance testing of the sensor. Since the sensor was a component of a larger system which was [...]

Endurance Testing using NI PXI

Endurance Testing using NI PXI An automation test stand permits faster validation, unattended test, an increase in throughput, and can free up resources for other tasks during the weeks long endurance test. Client - A manufacturer of aircraft components in the mil-aero industry Challenge New product development drove the need for a new aerospace endurance test stand for product validation. The old systems were not designed to test the newly designed part (aircraft actuators), [...]

Endurance Tester for Mission-Critical Mechanical Component using NI cRIO

Endurance Tester for Mission-Critical Mechanical Aerospace Component using NI cRIO Ability to run tests unattended and overnight reduces operator labor and compresses test schedules Client - Major Aerospace Component Supplier / Manufacturer ChallengeThe client had an older VB & PLC-based aerospace test bench in place already, but it was obsolete. A new endurance test bench needed to be developed to validate prototyped components (in this case, aircraft & aerospace bearings). Many of the prototypes are [...]

Product Validation using LabVIEW RT & LabVIEW FPGA – Electromechanical Actuator Test Stand

Product Validation using LabVIEW RT & LabVIEW FPGA - An electromechanical test stand for an aerospace actuator Automated testing reduces operator man hours and increases production throughput. Client - A manufacturer of actuators in the mil-aero industry. Challenge New Product Introduction (in this case a new controller and new actuators) drove the need for a new aerospace electromechanical test stand. Solution New NI PXI-based electromechanical test [...]

Product Validation & Production Test System – For complex Mission-critical sub-system

Product Validation & Production Test System - For complex Mission-critical sub-system Client Ensign-Bickford Aerospace & Defense Upgrade reduces per unit test time by ~40% and improves reliability of software Challenge The customer needed to upgrade their existing test system.  Their old test system was very manual: It did not provide ability for unattended operation The thermal control had to be set manually They wanted to do less manual review of the data [...]

Hidden Factory Assessments Lead to Waste and Cost Reductions

Sharing Business and Test Data Enables Efficiency Improvements   Reduce Production Costs by Coordinating Business and Test Data   Client: A major manufacturer of aerospace components Problem ScopeMany companies operate in a high-mix, low-volume manufacturing environment. In these situations, production of such parts is often complex, with long assembly and test procedures describing the process to make and verify the part. Discussions of automating any part of these processes are often dismissed because an automated test system is [...]

Decreasing Test Time for Aircraft Landing Gear

Decreasing Test Time for Aircraft Landing Gear Endurance Testing for Aircraft Nose Landing Gear Steering Client: A major manufacturer of aircraft landing systems Challenge A major manufacturer of aircraft landing equipment needed to develop a means of endurance and fatigue testing new designs for aircraft steering. The actuators involved in steering the nose landing gear (NLG) required precise and reliable control through thousands of steering cycles. Control loops needed to be closed at faster than 1 ms. [...]

If you need a custom test system for your mission-critical aero-def component,  reach out here.

Yes, I need a custom test system for my mission-critical part »

Want to learn how to make your assembly and test process a competitive advantage?  Check out this webinar »

Poll – Test engineering leaders: What would help you most? Vote and see how your peers voted!

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Test engineering leaders: What would help you most?

We’ve helped teams at some of the world’s most innovative companies

LinkedIn © Viewpoint Systems, Inc. | All Rights Reserved
This website uses cookies and third party services. See our privacy policy for more info. OK