Reducing uncertainty in aerospace development
EDITOR’ S CHOICE THE CASE FOR COTS
PORTESCAP
Reducing uncertainty in aerospace development
For most of the industry’ s history, aerospace has treated custom-built as the default answer to demanding applications. The reasoning behind this was sound— the environments are punishing, the certification bar is uncompromising, and the consequences of failure are severe. A motor engineered from scratch for a specific application on a specific aircraft could be optimized down to its electromagnetic core architecture, and this level of precision has always been prized.
That instinct for customization remains deeply embedded in aerospace engineering, but it is increasingly being tested by the realities of modern program development.
Certification requirements have grown more stringent and more time-consuming. Program timelines are shorter, not longer. New entrants, from urban air mobility platforms to unmanned aviation manufacturers, are competing to be first to fly, while cost pressures that were once largely confined to the industrial world are now firmly established across the commercial aerospace landscape.
The strategic response to these pressures is not, as it might first appear, to double down on custom design in the pursuit of certainty. It is often the reverse: to start with a commercial-off-the-shelf( COTS) motor platform whose environmental performance has already been tested against aerospace requirements, and to customize only where the application genuinely requires it.
The value of a known starting point
For aerospace engineers, the value of a known starting point is not
For many aerospace applications, a COTS platform with targeted customization offers a faster path to a testable device.
convenience— it’ s predictability. The more performance characteristics that are already understood and documented, the less uncertainty teams carry into testing, qualification, and certification activities.
Against that backdrop, DO-160G is an important reference point for aerospace development. Published by RTCA as Environmental Conditions and Test Procedures for Airborne Equipment, it provides a recognized framework for evaluating how equipment intended for aircraft installation performs under representative environmental and electromagnetic conditions. While not a substitute for system-level qualification, it nonetheless provides a common language and test baseline for assessing whether components are robust enough to be considered in an airborne environment.
For motors, that distinction is especially important. Whether integrated into out-of-cabin actuators, environmental control systems, fluid valves, or door actuation mechanisms, the motor plays a fundamental role in overall system performance and reliability. As a result, documented motor-level testing and characterization offer valuable risk reduction and design validation prior to undertaking more costly and time-consuming systemlevel qualification activities.
That is where environmental testing against requirements such as DO-160G becomes meaningful. By evaluating how a motor responds to shock, vibration, temperature extremes, humidity, and corrosion, engineers gain a clearer understanding of its behavior under representative aerospace conditions. System-level qualification remains essential, but component-level environmental data gives teams a more predictable foundation before integration risks begin to compound.
An OEM integrating a motor that has already been tested against DO- 160G requirements is not starting from an unknown. It is starting
38 PECM Issue 83