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By Dave Jesse on March 29, 2018

Sounds impossible? Well by now, dear reader, you should be ready for the unexpected. In today’s blog I shall reverse the natural order of things, turn the arrow of entropy back to front and disprove the second law of thermodynamics. I am going to show you two graphs from the same flight and demonstrate a […]

FDC

Dropping Drinks on your Toe

By Dave Jesse on February 12, 2018

..or the link between TCAS and apples… Recently my Safety Manager, Capt Herb Feller, asked if an aircraft carried out a Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) avoidance manoeuvre, and a loose drinks trolley ran down the aisle, what would be the force when it hit something or someone? As an engineer, it seemed […]

FDC

Red Eggs

By Dave Jesse on February 8, 2018

Welcome back, dear reader. I hope you had a happy holiday and wish you a fruitful New Year. In a few months’ time it will be Easter and some of our Greek friends will be celebrating with eggs coloured deep red like this one. He’s getting old and slightly crazy, you may think, […]

FDC

Safety Events and Shopping Baskets

By Charles Newey on January 9, 2018

Ever wondered what the link was between flight safety events and shopping baskets? No, me neither. But nonetheless, there is one. Let’s talk about it. One of our main jobs at Flight Data Services (as a flight safety company) is to generate events and alerts when the aircraft that we monitor exceed certain tolerances. For […]

FDC

Who Flies the Aeroplane?

By Dave Jesse on January 4, 2018

Looking Back The origins of the Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) process date back over twenty years and are enshrined in ICAO regulations. One of these states that “A flight data analysis programme shall be non-punitive and contain adequate safeguards to protect the source(s) of the data.” This need for data security has been implemented in […]

FDC

You Can’t Have a Binary KPV

By Dave Jesse on December 8, 2017

A long time ago I explained that our analysis of flight data is based upon the concept of a Key Point Value, where an aspect of a flight is reduced to a single number. For example, the airspeed at takeoff or the maximum angle of bank during a flight. These are analogue measurements, that […]

FDC

Data Quality in Flight Data Analytics

By Charles Newey on December 5, 2017

One of the core difficulties with analysing flight data is that analytics is very far removed from the initial production and ETL of data. Before any flight data reaches a data scientist, it has to pass through various teams of specialists to be converted into sensible formats for archival. This often leads to a […]

FDC

Women Pilots

By Dave Jesse on December 1, 2017

A “just for fun” blog – nothing mentally challenging this time! Portsmouth Guildhall Every month I help our local scout group to raise funds through a jumble sale. I run the book stall, selling second hand books for a few pence each. At the last sale someone had brought in some old local newspapers, […]

FDC

Computing Charts

By Dave Jesse on November 16, 2017

Well, it seems an age since I last blogged – somehow work gets in the way. I’ll have to complain to the boss about that one day. Anyway, we recently had a case where we needed to convert a chart into an algorithm, and I thought I’d give you the recipe I have used for […]

FDC

Why do our aircraft take off slowly on the first of the month?

By Charles Newey on November 14, 2017

This was one of the more interesting discoveries of the last few weeks, and I thought that it would make a fun post for Flight Data Community. As a part of my role as a Data Scientist, it is one of my responsibilities to ensure that the data we record and monitor is of high […]