How much amount of information Does it fit on a conventional hard disk, is it manageable, is it useful, can it generate the flight of an aircraft, does it fit on a conventional hard disk, is it manageable, is it useful?
Some time ago, we all talked about the hard disks we had in our computers as if they were big data storage places. They were measured in megabytes and it was a capacity that was difficult to fill over the lifetime of the computer. And although today we measure hard drive capacity in gigabytes and terabytes, making a mockery of those figures, at the time it really was true.
The ability to collect, store and transmit large volumes of real-time data from aircraft in flight is a significant safety improvement.
In the year 2000, a large computer appeared, namely the IBM Deskstar 75GXP, which had the largest storage capacity in the world at the time (in a commercial context). They were about 75 GB. Yes, as you read: 75 GB. Some of you reading this article may be thinking: only 75 GB of storage? smartphones have 128 GB! Well, I'm sorry to tell you that data is no longer measured in GB, but in TB of information, which is stored and navigated from one site to another... This is the famous term "Big Data", which you have probably heard in the news, newspapers or internet portals.
The Big Data is a term that refers to the storage of large amounts of data for subsequent study. It is a term that can be applied in many fields of interest, such as business or risk analysis, in which large amounts of information from various sources are analysed (we are talking about terabytes or petabytes). (1). Practical examples of Big Data applications are the analysis of consumer tastes, the exact time at which the most people are in a shop, the average age of large groups of people or passenger movement vectors at an airport.
The possibility of analysing these huge volumes of information and drawing conclusions has led to results such as deducing the most suitable style of music to encourage consumption, the exact time to play that style or the average percentage of advertising that a consumer is able to tolerate.
With this vast amount of data available, companies that make proper use of it have been able to increase their turnover to such an extent that a new type of employment has already been created, called "data-driven employment". Data Architech.
But let's get to the point: what does the term Big Data have to do with aeronautics? The answer is clear: a lot.
To explain this relationship, let us go back to an unfortunate but illuminating event that happened in March 2014 over the Indian Ocean: the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. That event opened a debate on the effectiveness of current tracking systems in the face of the difficulty of ascertaining the route taken by the plane and its final whereabouts. The problem is that most flight data is recorded on the black boxes of aircraft, But once they are lost, it will be difficult to recover the information. And that is where the concept of Big Data comes in. It has been calculated that during an aircraft's entire flight, it is possible to generate some 500-700 GB of data. These include temperature recorded by sensors throughout the aircraft, fuel level, humidity, altitude, altitude, speed, position, cabin images, external weather conditions and so on. All this data is being collected on many flights, but it is not collected until the aircraft lands. Not online dataThe new technologies are a step forward, but it is already a step forward to have them available, ready for use in case of need.
Added to this is the ever-increasing capacity of communications systems. The capacity to transmit large volumes of data over long distances is growing rapidly, so it is not unreasonable to expect that the entire volume of data generated by an aircraft can be collected in real time at ground stations. In this way, we would enter a new dimension in which the analysis of flight data would move from corrective to preventive. Undoubtedly a significant step forward.
I believe that Big Data is no longer a term or profession of the future, but of the present. Welcome to the age of data.
(1) Terabite is 1012 bytes; petabyte is 1015 bytes
