Flight Test Card

A flight test card is the detailed sequence of maneuvers, configurations, and data points to be flown during a single test flight. It is the contract between the engineering team that designed the test and the flight crew that flies it. Each line has acceptance criteria, a contingency, and a data-collection requirement. A well-built program plans hundreds of cards across a multi-year campaign, prioritized by certification risk. The pacing item is usually card-execution rate: weather, range availability, and instrumentation issues compress a planned 200-card month into 50. The 787 flight-test program logged 4,800-plus cards across 2,500-plus flight hours. Roles where this matters: Flight Test, Test Engineering, Certification.