Every airplane is unique. And considering comparatively low tech planes from 20+ years ago required 2-3 dozen (physical) maintenance manuals, one can only imagine the number of virtual pages of documentation required to know the details and repair procedures for each airplane today.
For every series and subset of aircraft there may be countless special maintenance directives that are issued to remedy risks and problems. Managing those document updates is a big deal, and knowing exact and correct details of each plane would be essential to rapid repair (and knowing exactly which parts to bring).
Not to take anything away from the amazing traveling repair experts, but none of this would be possible without HN-type folks building the data management and retrieval systems necessary to support it. So yay for us too.
> … one can only imagine the number of virtual pages of documentation required to know the details and repair procedures for each airplane today.
As much someone can write a procedure manual about how to fix something and teach it others, there is still a level of intangible skills, which come with long-term experience, to fix something that broken in an “organic” way (i.e. crumpled aluminum) that can’t be easily described in words.
This is what’s “magic” about these types of rapid response teams.
Maybe said another way: there are textbook failures and then there are real world failures. Usually the real world failures are problems that go far beyond the immediate technical failure and stretch into incentive structures, human fallibility, deeper physics, and unluckiness. Those failures are worth sharing and you won’t get help solving them from ChatGPT.
For every series and subset of aircraft there may be countless special maintenance directives that are issued to remedy risks and problems. Managing those document updates is a big deal, and knowing exact and correct details of each plane would be essential to rapid repair (and knowing exactly which parts to bring).
Not to take anything away from the amazing traveling repair experts, but none of this would be possible without HN-type folks building the data management and retrieval systems necessary to support it. So yay for us too.