Iron Bird TestingAircraft Flight Control Systems Test
An iron bird is a full-scale, ground-based integration rig used to validate critical aircraft systems, especially flight controls, in a controlled, repeatable environment before first flight.
Dewesoft provides precise, distributable measurement solutions for iron bird testing, combining multi-physics sensing, avionics bus logging, and synchronized video inside one software platform.
Highlights
Truly multi-physics
Scale your setup as needed and capture force, displacement, pressure, acceleration, and temperature with the most common sensor types, including full-bridge (DC or carrier-frequency), MEMS, voltage and current, potentiometers, encoders, resolvers, RTDs, thermocouples, and IR cameras. Add avionics bus integration and optional video, with all data fully time-synchronized.
Scale with electrical power
As actuators move from hydraulics to electric systems, you can expand your setup by adding the Dewesoft SIRIUS power analyzer, distributed where you need it. It combines power analysis, power quality, oscilloscope, and transient recording in one instrument, so you can measure electrical power alongside your existing channels and support modern, multi-attribute testing.
Easy-to-use software
Dewesoft provides plug-and-play workflows with DewesoftX software. It scales to thousands of channels and brings setup, recording, visualization, real-time analysis, reporting, and post-processing into one environment. Add sensors and signals with drag-and-drop and display them instantly in ready-made views like y-t, y-x, and polar plots. Customize the interface across multiple screens, automate test setups, and replay results anytime, including synchronized video and IR camera data.
Distributable, centralized, real-time integrated
Distribute DAQ units across your iron bird setup to measure in situ with short sensor cables, lower installation effort, and fully synchronized channels. If you prefer, you can also centralize everything in a rack. Either way, you can integrate in parallel and in real time via EtherCAT for automated test control.
Scalability and modularity
Our DAQ systems are modular and scale easily from dozens to thousands of I/O channels. You can expand at any time with additional input modules, without redesigning your architecture. Software costs stay predictable because DewesoftX licensing does not depend on channel count.
Signal quality and measurement integrity
Capture clean, trustworthy data, even in harsh EMI environments. Dewesoft delivers low-noise, high-resolution measurements with stable signal conditioning and strong common-mode rejection for small sensor signals. Built-in anti-aliasing, flexible sampling rates, and clear accuracy specifications help ensure every result is accurate and repeatable.
High-speed transient capture
Catch fast events without missing a sample. Dewesoft supports high sampling rates, pre- and post-trigger recording, and reliable buffering to capture short transients from actuators, valve switching, power electronics, and control-loop behavior.
Raw data storage
Record all sensor inputs, signal inputs, and calculated channels in raw format. This preserves data integrity, keeps the dataset flexible, and enables deeper post-processing, including comparisons with simulation results and ML or AI models.
Bus and protocol integration
Read and decode common avionics buses, including ARINC 429, ARINC 664 (AFDX®), Aerospace CAN, MIL-STD-1553, and ARINC 825. All bus data is time-stamped and recorded in parallel with your multi-physics measurements, so you can correlate commands, states, and timing with real-world system behavior.
Software included
Every Dewesoft data acquisition system is bundled with award-winning DewesoftX data acquisition software. The software is easy to use but very rich and deep in functionality. All software updates are free forever with no hidden licensing or yearly maintenance fees.
Dewesoft quality and 7-year warranty
Enjoy our industry-leading 7-year warranty. Our data acquisition systems are made in Europe, utilizing only the highest build quality standards. We offer free and customer-focused technical support. Your investment into the Dewesoft solutions is protected for years ahead.
We believe in our products!
And we're confident you'll love it too! But don't just take our word for it. Get hands-on with a demo unit, completely free of charge. No strings attached, just real data. Reach out to your local Dewesoft team and get your demo unit now!
Our base software is always free.
It includes everything you need for advanced data acquisition and common signal processing — no maintenance fees, no contracts. You buy it, you own it. All future updates? Free forever. And the best part? Analysis seats are unlimited and free. Once the data is recorded, anyone can download our software to review and analyze your data — no license needed.
Quality That Lasts.
At Dewesoft, quality is more than just a word — it's a commitment. That's why our products come with an industry-leading 7-year warranty. It's just one more way we protect your investment and give you peace of mind for the long run.
Quality, Made in Europe.
At Dewesoft, quality isn't just a promise — it's a core value. Our products are 100% designed, developed, and manufactured in-house, right in the heart of the European Union. From precision machining and PCB manufacturing to final assembly and software development — we do it all ourselves, to the highest ISO standards. We're proud to support local production and take social responsibility seriously.
Built by Us. Owned by Us.
Dewesoft is 100% owned by employees who believe in what we do — and love doing it. We’re in this with heart, passion, and long-term commitment. What does that mean for you? Our core value — caring for our customers — isn’t going anywhere. We’re here for the next 100 years, protected from outside acquisitions. Your investment in our technology is safe, supported, and future-proof.
Why Iron Bird Test?
As aircraft and spacecraft become more complex, iron bird testing remains essential for validating design integrity, system interactions, and safety. The real challenge is not collecting data, but capturing high-quality, time-synchronized insight across (electro-)hydraulics, actuators, flight-control surfaces, sensors, and newer electromechanical architectures.
Iron bird rigs enable full-scale, ground-based integration testing of mechanical and mechatronic systems long before an aircraft flies. They replicate the real layout and distances between components, which helps engineers validate the complete flight control system in real time. By simulating aerodynamic loads, system interactions, and fault scenarios across a wide range of maneuvers, an iron bird lets teams confirm performance, catch integration issues early, and improve safety and reliability well before first flight.
Testing focus
Flight control system
Actuators
Flight control computer
Hydraulic power systems
Electrical systems
Landing gear
Door systems
Target
A safe, controlled environment for running flight and load scenarios and evaluating actuators, control surfaces, hydraulics, power systems, and true in-the-loop setups.
Full-system interaction testing is the most reliable way to confirm how systems behave together across domains, early in development.
Real-time troubleshooting requires repeatable test scenarios, but it is often time-consuming and difficult to reproduce in flight, even with fault injection.
Significant cost and schedule savings by catching integration issues before full aircraft assembly.
A validation platform for flight-control logic, redundancy management, and fault-injection testing.
True Challenges in Aircraft Testing
The aviation industry is undergoing a major transformation. Hydraulic systems are increasingly being replaced by electrical actuators, while aircraft rely more on complex electronics and embedded software. At the same time, next-generation, Ethernet-based vehicle networks are becoming part of standard architectures.
In this environment, every mechanical and mechatronic system, along with cabling, hydraulic or electric power, and flight control functions, must remain safe and reliable across all operating conditions.
We see several challenges, testing maneuvers and incidents before real lift-off:
System complexity & integration: Modern aircraft rely on highly interconnected mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and software-driven electronics systems. The biggest challenge isn’t testing components individually - it’s verifying how they behave together under dynamic conditions in simulated / emulated real-world conditions. Unexpected interactions between actuators, sensors, power systems, and flight-control software are common sources of late-stage failures.
Data fragmentation: Traditional test setups often use multiple independent measurement systems for structures, hydraulics, avionics, electrical, and control loops, bench and in-flight instrumentation. This creates data silos, makes synchronization difficult, and complicates root-cause analysis - especially when inducing incidents like transient events.
High safety & reliability requirements: Aviation tolerates zero critical failures. Proving redundancy, fault tolerance, load response, and behavior under abnormal conditions requires test environments that can replicate real flight loads without risking hardware or personnel.
Cost & schedule pressure: Finding integration issues late in the development cycle is extremely expensive. Validation clearly “shifts left”, but without a physical prototype under test, type certification is not possible (FAA, EASA). Aircraft programs must identify mechanical, hydraulic, and control-system issues as early as possible to avoid redesigns and delays, before take-off.
Why Dewesoft?
Traditional test setups often miss the mark. They can produce noisy or unstable signals, rely on multiple instruments that are hard to manage, and do not scale well for mixed signals or electric power measurements. It is also difficult to connect rapid mechanical load changes with equally fast control-system responses.
Dewesoft fixes these issues with one unified acquisition platform built for iron bird testing. Engineers can measure mechanical, hydraulic, thermal, electrical, and control-system signals together, fully synchronized. This removes data silos and speeds up troubleshooting. With high channel counts and real-time evaluation of actuators, power systems, and feedback loops, you get a clear view of system performance long before the aircraft reaches the runway.
Dewesoft is more than just a DAQ product provider. We are a trusted partner in engineering and testing and we collaborate with aviation customers for the future of aviation.
Benefits of Dewesoft
Trusted by leading aircraft manufacturers and research institutions.
Easy to integrate in test beds (Iron Bird, Copper Bird, Power-Hardware-in-the-Loop - PHIL).
Unique eco system covering multi-physics with a single software, covering multiple attributes.
Proven reliability in mission-critical applications.
Tailored support from consultancy, concept to certification.
Used in Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) ensuring operational reliability.
Industry-leading 7-year warranty.
We offer a free trial of our hardware and software. Contact us and arrange your demo unit(s) today and try the solution before you decide to buy it.
The result
faster test cycles, deeper understanding of system interactions, and earlier detection of integration issues that otherwise surface late in development - where they’re most costly. Dewesoft empowers mechanical, mechatronic and electrical teams to validate every single component, and the overall full-scale setup with all interfaces, with confidence, supporting safer, smarter, and more efficient aircraft designs.
DewesoftX: complete software for aircraft iron bird testing
Our award-winning DewesoftX data acquisition software, is the complete measurement and data analysis software.
DewesoftX is delivering powerful data analysis, long-duration data recording, and delivering the flexibility test engineers need to validate functionality, reliability, and other relevant attributes.
Software features for accurate and successful testing:
Visualizing time-based signals, together with selectable graphical reference curves including alarm triggers, accelerates reporting.
Full flight profile recording of raw and calculated signals, in parallel to triggered events.
Flexible result driven online signal analysis including full algebra, statistics (min, max, mean, etc.), rise time, overshoot, settling time, bus latency and signal timing (step or frequency response, system response, fault-response), transients and steady-state pressure, flow rate, pump and pressure performance (speed, load, ripple, leak analysis), thermal trends, to pilot command traceability vs. system output - open programming interfaces adding more features.
Scale to work with thousands of signals, multiple screens, high data and storage throughput.
Reading avionics buses (ARINC 429, ARINC 664 - AFDX®, Aerospace CAN, MIL-STD-1553, or ARINC 825), and recording it synchronously and in parallel to multi-physics sensing.
Video camera support (standard, infrared - IR).
Able to run with different configurations - single master / multi clients or even multi master and multi clients.
Scale to Aircraft Electric Power analysis, covering AC and DC, electrical power analysis, electrical power quality, motor or actuator efficiency.
Support of telemetry for Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI).
And more features upon your request.
DewesoftX is the right choice for aircraft iron bird testing, iron copper, andpower testing. It unifies powerful visualisation of all signal types in time, frequency or angular domain.
Dewesoft DAQ hardware for iron bird test
Dewesoft data acquisition systems truly distributable DAQ solutions, offering an outstanding flexibility in supporting all common transducer and sensor technologies.
Main benefits of the Dewesoft data acquisition systems:
Scaling up to hundreds of channels testing full-scale setups.
Multi-physics support measuring force, strain, angle, displacement, pressure, flow, temperature, acceleration, vibration, noise / acoustics.
Dewesoft supports all common transducers and sensor technologies, and it reduces setup time through automatic channel configuration with TEDS. Supported inputs include piezoelectric sensors, resistive bridge sensors, RTDs (Pt100, Pt1000), thermocouples, proximity probes, standardized voltage and current signals (0/4–20 mA), potentiometers, LVDTs, and more.
Analog inputs are fully isolated (galvanic isolation with high voltage isolation and contact safe).
Highly accurate inputs with low signal distortion, paired with long-term robustness, and low temperature drift- Everything fully calibrated with traceable results (PTP/NIST, accuracy class, measurement uncertainty).
Scale sampling rates to match the physics you are measuring, from 1 S/s per channel for thermal signals to 40 kS/s per channel for mechanical and mechatronic dynamics. For electrical power and high-speed transients, add the SIRIUS Power Analyzer with up to 15 MS/s per channel and 5 MHz bandwidth.
Various time synchronization options: Ethernet PTPv2 (IEEE1588:2008), GNSS, IRIG-B.
Easy to integrate with your system integrator of choice via EtherCAT, Ethernet (openDAQ, OPC UA, MQTT, and proprietary protocols), and CAN FD.
Robust and portable instruments for Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI).
Dewesoft IOLITE or KRYPTON are the perfect DAQ solutions that cover modern multi-physics measurement approaches.
Whenever higher sample rates are required, SIRIUS is the best choice. It can easily cover 200kS/s per channel and some modules go as high as 2 MS/s or even 15 MS/s. This is often the case when electric power measurement, power quality measurement, electro-magnetic interference analysis (EMI), transient recordings (mechanical, electrical) or harmonics need to be covered.
Open by Default – Fully openDAQ™ Compliant
Dewesoft DAQ systems are built on the openDAQ™ framework — a standardized, open, modular data acquisition SDK for measurement, data acquisition, and testing. OpenDAQ allows you to easily discover all openDAQ-compliant hardware and integrate data into your custom software.
openDAQ SDK is available for anly operating system, including Linux, Windows, and MacOS. The SDK comes along with a bunch of language bindings like C++, C#, Python, Delphi or also LabVIEW.
Designed with flexibility in mind, openDAQ™ simplifies everything from device discovery and configuration to high-speed data streaming and diagnostics.
All new-gen Dewesoft DAQ hardware is fully openDAQ-compliant and open by default. This ensures seamless integration into your workflows while supporting a wide range of industry standards.
To help you get started quickly, openDAQ offers ready-to-use examples and AI-powered tools for effortless integration and fast data access—so you can focus on insights, not setup.
Explore more aerospace testing solutions
Iron bird testing is often part of a broader validation program. Dewesoft also supports related aerospace and rotating machinery workflows, all within the same synchronized acquisition and analysis environment.
Aircraft electrical power testing: Measure power, harmonics, transients, and power quality, time-synchronized with control and sensor data.
eVTOL testing: Scale from component to system-level tests, combining multi-physics sensing, electrical power measurement, buses, and synchronized video.
Jet engine testing: Capture dynamic data from engine development and certification, from vibration and strain to temperatures and performance parameters.
Aircraft structural testing: Run reliable fatigue and static tests with high channel counts, synchronized measurements, and streamlined reporting.
Order analysis: Track rotating machinery behavior with RPM-synchronous analysis for run-ups, coast-downs, and variable-speed conditions.
FFT analyzer: Perform real-time frequency analysis for vibration and acoustic diagnostics, troubleshooting, and validation.
Got Questions? We've Got Answers!
We've gathered all the answers you're looking for, neatly organized just for you.
Dewesoft DAQ systems support the most common sensors and signal types used in iron bird testing, across mechanical, hydraulic, electrical, and thermal domains.
You can measure force and load, displacement and position, angle, voltage, current, acceleration and vibration, pressure and flow, temperature and humidity, and digital inputs. Video is also supported, including high-speed and infrared (thermal) cameras. In addition, you can acquire vehicle bus signals.
All channels are captured simultaneously and fully time-synchronized.
Yes. That’s truly the winning factor. Your selected DAQ setup can start with subsystem or component level test beds to full-scale test rig including all sub-systems where all DAQs are used in a distributed networked way or centralized. Full-scale test beds can easily scale to a few hundred signals.
The system supports all common digital A&D busses like ARINC 429, MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 664/AFDX, Aerospace CAN, and ARINC825, recording decoded signals synchronously with multi-physics measurements.
On the Integration side you can integrate the DAQ system in real-time via EtherCAT or CAN FD / CAN bus or to any other platform via Ethernet (openDAQ, XCP, UDP IP, OPC UA, or MQTT).
You can add electrical power measurement alongside multi-physics sensing by adding our Power Analyzers. They 100% integrate withing our DAQs and yse the same DewesoftX software. This will enable you to combine mechanical, hydraulic, thermal and electrical power test, all fully syncronised, and visualized.
Each Dewesoft DAQ system includes DewesoftX software, with free lifetime software updates and no annual maintenance fees.
Most users can get started without formal training, but you can take advantage of Dewesoft Academy courses focused on applications, technology, or specific products, plus an online training option.
You also get customer-focused technical support and an industry-leading seven-year warranty.
DewesoftX offers flexible, configurable user interfaces and supports multi-screen operation. You can automate test setups, control sequences, and result replay, including time-synchronized camera playback. For advanced workflows, built-in scripting lets you automate tasks directly within the software.
DewesoftX includes a wide range of built-in, real-time analysis functions that work out of the box, with no programming required. Typical iron bird use cases include statistics, step and frequency response, rise time and settling time, bus latency and signal timing, transient detection, hydraulic steady-state behavior, thermal trending, and tracing pilot commands against system output.
We support several time-synchronization options commonly used in aerospace test environments. In most setups, all DAQ units are synchronized via Ethernet using PTPv2 (IEEE 1588:2008). When required, for example with certain high-speed cameras, we also support IRIG-B.
Still have questions?
Can't find the answer you're looking for? Our team is happy to answer your questions.