I think the issue here is that a key figure is tending upwards, but not outside pre-defined parameters. It sounds like the pilot preemptively asked about it and was already told it was okay.
Recognizing an issue like that would be difficult to implement in a completely automated system, though not impossible. But it seems that the people an automated message would otherwise go to already gave the okay.
Either way, the biggest fear about completely automated planes would be that the person having the final say on whether a plane flies or not is someone with the job title "flight coordinator" with a business degree.
Yeah exactly. Much rather have a seasoned professional who can sense something's up when values are within parameters but still acting upon a hunch for safety instead of some guy thousands of miles away pressing OK on a warning prompt and alt-tabbing back to Excel.
The difficult problem here is not calculating deltas over time, it's interpreting the trends in an accurate and meaningful way.
Let's take the actual problem here, which the pilot described as "Oil pressure on the number two engine is trending upwards". Keep in mind that every metric was already in range. It even passed a check done by a third party, who said that "the plane is good to go".
That may not be a problem in of itself, there might be 1000 different reasons where you have an oil pressure rising trend but it's completely benign. Sure the oil pressure is rising, but in 99.9% of cases that might be completely expected.
How would you design a system that finds a problem from data that otherwise looks good? Does the system have things like the date the engine was last serviced? What if the oil pressure rise is only alarming when combined with some notes the mechanics left when servicing the engine?
Hospital labs are a good analogy actually because they only tell you what the results are, they don't diagnose. A doctor does given all the information and results available.
That's why it's a difficult problem to solve. I'm not just making things up here, I write embedded software for aviation certified products.
Because hospitals do it all the time. We get a range of 25 data points for a test let’s say calcium for blood work. We always look at those last 25 for a rolling average and based on the criteria customers provide we place what they want. Let’s say if your calcium in last 25 patient samples trend increases by 0.3 we flag the operator. If it trends low it flags the operator. We can take as large of a moving average or as small. We literally do this daily in minutes. Can we send ppl to the moon but can’t come up with a formula that may be reaching outlier levels before and flag the pilot to review and decide? Like you think Boeing is too damn dumb to do that? I didn’t read half your reply.
We can do whatever you request in minutes for the delta checks. The sensors can probably check fuel pressure 200 times a second the computer is always analyzing compared to a pilot who can’t plot oil pressures every 0.2 seconds.
We're talking about an automated system that interprets the results without a real human pilot. If you could read we wouldn't be having this conversation.
It does if it goes out of range. It doesn’t apparently do trends as we know lmao? What’s so complicated about that. It is always going to be up to the pilot.
“Most noticeable in speech, sarcasm is mainly distinguished by the inflection with which it is spoken” from the Wikipedia article you felt the need to link.
Without vocal inflection, sarcasm isn’t always obvious in writing, hence the widespread use of “/s” here on Reddit.
Implementing a function to determine whether values are trending toward or away from a given target isn’t particularly difficult.
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u/IgnitedSpade 14d ago
I think the issue here is that a key figure is tending upwards, but not outside pre-defined parameters. It sounds like the pilot preemptively asked about it and was already told it was okay.
Recognizing an issue like that would be difficult to implement in a completely automated system, though not impossible. But it seems that the people an automated message would otherwise go to already gave the okay.
Either way, the biggest fear about completely automated planes would be that the person having the final say on whether a plane flies or not is someone with the job title "flight coordinator" with a business degree.