For flight data metrics, this makes sense, but this is significantly already happening with aircraft systems transmitting data back to central monitoring systems in realtime. Pilots can see an errant value (say a moderately high temperature somewhere) and call up an engine specialist and ask them if it's a concern and that specialist can look at a plethora of data on the plan in flight. The planes can also "phone home" and report things which should be looked over or fixed during the next downtime and maintenance organizations can proactively order parts or schedule personnel to fix issues before the plane even lands. This is all being done in the name of efficiency, but, it no doubt has positive safety benefits too. Airlines and manufacturers can already run a query like "how many hours between replacement of part X on average" and "how many hours between replacements of part X for planes which regularly fly to middle eastern countries (hot and dry)"
For audio recordings, in the absence of an incident, I see no reason to do it.
Or at the very least, entered into the aircraft maintenance log. Back in my flying days, we had to enter every issue, large or small, into the aircraft maintenance logbook, and we also had to check it before each new flight to see what other crews had experienced, and whether the fault was signed off as 'fixed' or an 'up' fault that we could take into the air with us on the next flight.
I believe the tighter turnaround times of flights these day may either mean this step is rushed too quickly or omitted altogether...
They happen regularly! That's why you have checks between flights, no mater how short the flight. Daily, weekly, monthly and by cycles(flights) or hours maintenance. You have leaks, breakage, electronics get fried, conexions get loose.
Aircraft parts are numbered and tracked they hace a limited live span depending the function. I can not imagine an airplane wirking properly and safely without all this care.
That's probably true, but the potential for a severe, un-recoverable issue is about as high. An aircraft is composed of hundreds of individually tracked components with associated information about how old the component is, how much it has flown, etc. Most of these parts have a mandatory expiration date at which point it is swapped out or sent for repair. A failure in the system which tracks all this data (which is what I work on) isn't quite as directly dangerous as, say, a bug in the on-board navigational software. But you can still end up flying around with an engine way past its intended expiration date far too easily.
That would be interesting to hear how they come up with those maintenance schedules. Even with the uptick in flights, it doesn't seem like they'd have the dearth of reliability data to make that determination with reasonable accuracy. But maybe they have a lot of internal reliability data we're not privy to.
Agreed. I know a fair bit about what keeps my single-engine piston aircraft in the sky, and many of the possible faults are routinely checked/confirmed OK during pre-flight inspection and/or run-up.
Still, I don't want to inadvertantly miss a 500-hr magneto IRAN, a wing spar or bolt NDT inspection interval, run my dry vacuum pump twice as long as I planned, or several other possible faults that aren't easily testable by other than maintenance technicians.
It’s called predictive maintenance and it is the norm in many critical industries. Replacing equipment every fixed number of X years (no matter what the condition of the equipment is) is wasteful, costly disruptive and does not actually guarantee better reliability. (although it makes people feel better).
Most predictive maintenance is done with data — updated sensor data processed through a mathematical model derived from principles from reliability engineering. In a sense it’s actually more realistic than the X years model (which is a once off number derived from some reliability model too but doesn’t have the benefit of being updated with real data — it’s usually an overly conservative number)
But that is highly likely to be a trailing indicator. Some things like door plug blowouts apparently happen a few months after poor manufacturing processes occur, the question is how long do loose screws, cable frictions, or incorrectly bored holes in pressure bulkheads take to manifest?
It seems to me that we’re only at the start of statistical changes to the 737’s historic accident to operating hours ratio.
Do I want to be an unexpected data point or death and injury there? Not so much. A320-series or 737NGs for me for the foreseeable future I think, and those flights don’t generally cost a penny more.
What about running repairs in something like Cassandra? In some cases it is by design. Here I'm a little surprised an airliner would even go that long without a reboot
I think this is one of the areas that airlines are super good at. Every single plane needs strict regular maintenance and tons of checklists in order to take off, so something like a 50-day requirement for a reboot would be in that list of items, and if the people aren't following those lists of items you're going to have things like turbine failures, so they get done.
Maybe if there's a really badly run airline it might be a problem, but there are much more severe problems than software in a case like that.
Boeing gets away with this software issue because it's not really a big issue. The scary point the media can tell you because you don't have context to understand why it's mundane.
Do you think the reliability is up to it? I'm thinking of in relation to an airliner that was inspected just before a flight that will be at most 12 hours long.
OTOH, compare that to Oakland to Osaka (to pull two cities out of the air) and a trip taking around two weeks. What level of reliability do you need to have to ensure that nothing important breaks? Does this impose an additional cost that's less than the savings of having no crew.
It's an interesting idea that I'm sure will eventually happen but I'm wondering if it's really ready for prime time.
Though, if the maintenance schedule items are mostly of the form "W needs to be inspected after X flight hours, Y landings, or Z days since last inspection", there's probably significantly less experience backing up the Z parameter.
The new planes like this Airbus do actually transmit real-time maintenance data. So, there were something like 10 transmissions from the plane that apparently include large amounts of data regarding the systems that were failing and when.
Especially when you compare that to all the other maintenance that has to happen routinely on a plane for it to remain safe. Not a reason to not fix it though.
That’s pretty incredible. After a heavy maintenance breakdown, what percentage of the plane gets replaced? Or is everything already on a routine maintenance schedule so the intention is to visually identify unexpectedly failing parts?
They are, and now this is just an additional thing that's inspected for and dealt with as part of the regular service life. Every plane you've ever flown in has had an unexpectedly high failure rate of some component that wasn't discovered until it was in service, which resulted in a modification to the published inspection/maintenance/replacement routine.
For audio recordings, in the absence of an incident, I see no reason to do it.
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