The VH-71 was a program for the U.S. presidential helicopter (Marine One).
Imagine that a new generation of Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) ground station was to be developed. These HUMS runs on a laptop that stays on ground (thus the name ground station) and after debrief (which is the operation that runs the gathered monitoring systems data - flight data - from the helicopter through a series of algorithms) it will allow for an informed decision (by the maintenance personnel) on whether it is safe to continue to fly it or not for a few more hours.
Would you like to have been part of it? Would you do it using waterfall? What kind of documents would you have included in the technical baseline? Against what standards would it have been built?What level of effort would you have had spent on analysis, implementation, validation and acceptance? What would have been the project duration for it?
About VH-71: It was based on AgustaWestland AW101, formerly EH101 (BTW did you know that the EH101 should have been EHI 01 but a transcription error caught on)?
- Some history on VH-71: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_VH-71_Kestrel
- Here's the helicopter database info with info on all vehicles built (some of them are now flying doing S&R in Canada): http://www.helis.com/database/model/275/
- AgustaWestland is a world giant of the helicopter industry, part of an even bigger company (Finmeccanica): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgustaWestland
- Related models include EH-101 (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgustaWestland_EH101) and AW101 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgustaWestland_AW101)
- And now, for something completely different: Some google indexed photos: http://www.google.pt/search?q=vh71a+photos&gws_rd=cr&ei=Xxu9VrWIMsyHaI3ao6gB
- And a model to build your own Marine One: https://www.super-hobby.com/products/VH-71-Marine-ONE-EH-101.html
Links last verified at 2016-04-21.
PS. About the H/C being "like a rock", contrarily to a plane that should... plane (includes a part with the latest Cosmos series presenter, very well known scientist in the US):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTqu9iMiPIU; and a video with crazy operations and landings being done by H/Cs.
(2016-05-12: Added 2 videos; 2016-05-18: small rephrases; 2017-10-31: added link to HC model)
