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412TW/EWWI - (661) 555-9012
Mail comments or inquiries to Rick
Q. Public or Mike Smith
 The IFAST,
part of the Avionics/Electronic Warfare Test Division, is located at the
Avionics Test & Integration Complex (ATIC).
The IFAST is provides a secure, safe, and cost effective test
environment for integration laboratories to evaluate hardware and software interactions
with entire test vehicle avionics/vetronics suites and weapon/sensor systems.
Cost reductions in ground test are achieved in comparison to flight test and
many ground tests can be accomplished that might otherwise would be unsafe
or impractical to achieve in flight. The ultimate purpose of the integrated
ground and flight test approach supported by the IFAST, is avionics performance
risk reduction and improved capabilities for all.
It consists of a three-story building containing six avionic test bays
(6,800 sq. ft. each), engineering and technical support areas, and management
support areas. The facility includes cooling air for equipment, environmental
conditioning, coolanol liquid, a 15,000 lb. capacity freight elevator, closed
circuit television (CCTV), and automated security cardkey access control.
IFAST provides other unique facility capabilities.
These include reconfigurable hardware-in-the-loop avionic and radar spread benches,
24-hour test operations year-round with no weather, environmental, facility,
or operating restrictions. Existing test bays are cleared for open storage and
are designed to accomodate classified testing up to and including Secret. It
contains a local area network, inter-bay video transmission lines, fiber-optic
links interconnecting selected integration laboratories with a modeling and
simulation laboratory and an installed systems test facility.
The facility is strategically positioned such
that antebay windows provide an ideal field of view for integration testing of
RF, EO, and IR weapon systems. Radar systems can be positioned in the antebays
to track dedicated targets and targets of opportunity as well as synthetically
generated RF targets. Weapon and targeting sensor systems can be integrated
with aircraft platform avionics and positioned to image on IR target boards,
desert or mountainous terrain.
IFAST provides unique test capabilities, the most
important of which include:
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