NIAR’s Aircraft Structural Testing and Evaluation Center located in the Hawker Beechcraft plant is a huge site – the size of football field.
It is time consuming to run around the entire location to keep track of the tests in progress, and costly to keep staff working during the night to monitor the tests. There are also safety issues with large equipment, high structures and dangerous pressure testing of windshields, etc.
Milestone XProtect Enterprise IP video management software is controlling Axis 213 network Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras and Axis 210A fixed network cameras strategically installed throughout the hangar.
Time and money are saved while visual access is improved. It is much faster to check on test activities and progress without having to run throughout the big building. Remote access from home saves travel time to the site during off-hours, and allows system viewing for NIAR staff at the school campus across town or eventually for customers in other cities worldwide. Personnel no longer have to risk unsafe test situations to monitor their work, as the camera views provide it to them in visually improved zoom views from the software user interface on monitors in the office nearby. The images can also be exported for test reporting purposes.
Wichita is the city recognized as the "Air Capital of the World" for being a major aircraft manufacturing hub. Through these connections, the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) at Wichita State University integrates academic, government and business entities in cooperative efforts to advance technologies for aviation and other industries. It is a high-tech research, development, testing, certification and learning center.
The Institute employs a full-time staff of more than 200, plus nearly 100 student and graduate research assistants. The Aircraft Structural Testing and Evaluation Center at Hawker Beechcraft has about 45 staff, many of whom now enjoy the benefits of using IP video surveillance technology
The primary purpose of the IP video surveillance at NIAR is to monitor the aviation tests. The secondary goal is to make the surveillance remotely available to customers worldwide. This saves them the expense of sending people over to see the tests," says Larry Braden, Manager/Senior Research Engineer in the Full Scale Structural Test Facility at NIAR.
The lab performs aging aircraft inspections on aircraft with flight hours, which are taken out of the field for a complete tear-down inspection
For the surveillance implementation we had some security concerns about what to record and what everybody can see. We have many different customers and very few want to share information (with each other). So we had to be careful in our installation – especially with the cameras given remote access operation – that people cannot pan over to look at another customer’s test. We therefore limited the number of cameras, and the Milestone software allows us to control user access without having to limit our own flexibility,"
