Design and Simulation of an ARINC-429 Interfacing and Ingestion Module for Real-Time Aircraft Data Acquisition: System Overview and Functional Validation

Flight Data Recorders (FDRs) and Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVRs) are the standard systems for capturing aircraft data, designed primarily for post-flight and accident analysis. They do not provide a continuous real-time monitoring channel to the ground. This paper presents the system design and functional simulation of an Interfacing and Ingestion Module (IIM) for the BLUE BOX real-time aircraft telemetry system. The IIM acts as a non-intrusive, parallel monitoring lane alongside the existing FDR/CVR systems. The proposed module accepts flight data, cockpit audio, and cockpit video as inputs and processes them through a chain that includes engineering-unit conversion, CRC-16 error detection, timestamp generation, priority handling, FIFO buffering, and packetization. The system is modelled and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. Functional validation results covering controlled error injection, CRC-16 error detection, ground-station data recovery, and throughput measurement confirm that the proposed IIM processing chain operates correctly and provides a viable architecture for real-time aircraft data monitoring.