[tzs]

> The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it

There are something like 10k commercial flights in the air at a given time around the world. How would that somebody on the ground know to look at that particular plane's telemetry?

[jarek]

This is the least difficult part of the whole scheme. A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human operator to inspect would help greatly. There'd be a lot of false alarms but still vastly less work than looking at telemetry of every plane ever. (And even if - 10k is around the number of employees of one mid-size airport - hardly undoable if you wanted.)

[ekianjo]

> A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human operator to inspect would help greatly.

Look at what happened in flight AF447. Everything occurred in a matter of minutes. Even if what you mentioned were to be in place, there would be virtually no time for an operator to do anything about it. And probably such operators would have to go through textbook questions because such regulations would be imposed on them by the FAA.

That's why we have several pilots in every aircraft, to mitigate the risk of human failure. Having more operators outside of the plane are not going to help much. If you want to put more engineering power, it's more software in the plane that is the right way to go for safety, as demonstrated so many times before.

[judk]

There are millions of web page changes on the Internet every day. How would a Google engineer know to look at one particular page to update the index?

[fnordfnordfnord]

By constantly comparing incoming data to known-good historical flight data and flagging instances that fall outside the norm?