Abstract
Knowledge about loads occurring in the structure during aircraft operation is vital from the point of view of the damage tolerance approach to aircraft design. In the best-life scenario, such information could be available from a network of sensors, e.g. strain gauges, installed in the aircraft structure to measure local stresses. However, operational loads monitoring (OLM) systems are still not widely applied. Instead, what is available is a set of flight parameters, which by the laws of inertia and aerodynamics help determine the dominant part of loads acting on a given element. This paper discusses the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) as a method for selecting the flight parameters used to predict aircraft loads. CCA allows for the identification of both different modes of stress distribution as well as flight parameters which are best suited for their prediction. The paper presents the application of this method to identify loads acting on the vertical stabilizer of an aircraft.