Avionics News April 2013 - 41

OPPOSITE PAGE: Peregrine's flight test aircraft displays the company's
newest badge — the Trig ADS-B Out STC.
LEFT: A technician secures the NexNav Mini GPS into the flight test aircraft.
BELOW: Peregrine fires up Trig's TT31 transponder.

certification date. All dates proved to be quite ambitious as
dates started slipping.”
Based at Centennial Airport, Peregrine provides systems
engineering, integration, test and certification for the general aviation industry. The team supports companies seeking
Federal Aviation Administration type certification, supplemental type certification, parts manufacturer approval and
technical standard orders.
LONG HOURS, NEW TERRITORY
During the process, Peregrine’s FAA delegates, engineers,
technicians and pilots scrutinized Trig’s transponders, putting in hundreds of hours of work. Engineers reviewed design
data, created drawings and developed installation instructions.
Technicians ground tested the equipment in the aircraft. The
company’s designated airworthiness representative inspected
the installation while the designated engineering representative evaluated the impact on the aircraft’s other systems. The
flight test DER handled human factors testing, from checking
readability in various lighting conditions to evaluating pilot
workload.
But this was just the beginning. It wasn’t an ordinary STC,
and it required far more cooperation and deliberation.
“It wasn’t just plug in and go … this kind of data collection exercise is difficult without the cooperation of the
transponder vendor,” said Andy Davis, CEO of Trig Avionics. “You would never be able to tell whether it was working
right just by looking at it. For example, measuring latency of
position fix on the ramp is impossible, but there are latency
requirements to meet.”
Mongeau agreed. “The better balance of the hours worked
on these programs was spent not on the actual installation
of the equipment, but on the documentation of the specific
and complex compliance matrices that compare the actual
behavior with the required behavior,” he said.
For the team, the biggest obstacle came in working with
new technology within a brand new regulatory environment.

“We have managed and supported many TCs, STCs and
TSOs; however, there was always a precedent with clear,
well-defined regulations and certification paths,” Mongeau
said. “It was clear that we needed to, in collaboration with
the FAA, determine how to go about getting this STC.”
Questions dominated the team’s work: “Where and how
can we best accomplish the flight evaluations?” Mongeau
said. “How is the FAA going to communicate the ground
station data to us, and how are we going to effectively and
accurately communicate our in-flight data? Then, how do
we determine if the data is good or bad? How do we validate the data? Also, how would we be able to add and expand models? Would unique installations be required for
each configuration? What types of aircraft would most
likely be acceptable under our process?”
Even access to the ground stations couldn’t be taken for
granted.
“We are located in Colorado where the FAA network of
ground stations is still in the process of being activated,” Mongeau said. “The areas of the country around the coasts and the borders already have ground station coverage, but the interior of the
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Avionics News April 2013

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