21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-R.4.5

DYNAMIC SEAT TESTING AND HEAD INJURY CRITERIA-AN AIRCRAFT MANUFACTURER'S EXPERIENCE AND A VIEW ON THE FUTURE

van Beek J. A. B.
PILATUS Aircraft Ltd., Stans (CH)

Keywords: dynamic seat testing, head injury criteria

This paper presents the procedures and methods applied in the crash worthiness certification testing of the PILA TUS PC-12 crew and passenger seats. The problems encountered in the Head Injury Criteria (HIC) component testing have shown that it can not replace the more expensive full scale testing, but is still useful for development testing and for reducing the number of full-scale tests. Especially the simulation of complicated impact situations with the currently available test devices and the correlation with full-scale test results is difficult. The crashworthiness requirements in FAR 23.526 have resulted in considerably higher certification costs compared with the old 9-g seats. At the same time, however, the PC-12 customers want a high degree of cabin layout flexibility. In order to offer cabin flexibility at low costs HIC related parameters must be defined in the seat specification. In addition a certification procedure should be applied, in which component testing is used for locating critical impact situations for the seat design and for selecting the critical impact situations for HIC full-scale testing. In this way a large number of possible cabin layouts can be analysed and certified, whereas only a few HIC full scale tests will be required.

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