Hey HN! I had a flight cancelled last month because of a defect (a spoiler system fault) that wasn’t deferrable under the MEL. That meant: no legal way to dispatch the aircraft, so we cancelled the flight and I got an extra few nights in Austin.
While we were explaining to passengers why we couldn’t go, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realise that airlines can (and do) fly with certain things inoperative, but only under very specific, pre-defined rules.
I wrote up a bit of insight into how the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) works, hope you enjoy reading!
If you ever hear my name on the PA, please come up to say hello! In fact, after the flight when it is not busy, we are always happy to have visitors in the flight deck. Feel free to drop me a message any time too, the A350 is a pretty small fleet, so the chances are higher than one would think! :)
I have only had very few incident with ill-behaved passengers, and none that escalated. Ill passengers is a different story, especially on longer flights! With no hard data to back this up, I think that medical emergencies are probably the most common form of abnormal event that we encounter.
Cool website! The idea of rendering it to a video is an interesting one.
I had thought that a challenge trying to turn something like I have built into a business would be that people would be reluctant to pay for (yet another) subscription for something like this that they probably look at infrequently.
Anim8's business model lets you buy credits that you can then use over whatever time works for you. Essentially a use fee rather than a pay regardless of use.
Thanks! My father being a pilot certainly played a large part, not in the sense that he forced me into it, but rather that I had the opportunity to sit on the jump seat as a kid (pre-9/11) and it planted the seed quite early.
After finishing my degree, British Airways had opened their cadet pilot scheme - windows of opportunity like that are usually short and infrequent, so I went for it! The nice this is that I can still code and keep up on the software engineering trends (what I tell myself while checking HN for the n-th time in a day) on the side, and I think it is also a safe set of skills to have in case I can no longer fly (pandemics, losing my medical, etc)
Thank you! I have text comments/remarks for all particularly memorable flights (for all of the above reasons you mentioned, plus famous passengers, family on board, etc), but some of those are quite private and also difficult to show in a visualisation like this.
I would love to track more data over time, but balancing that with it being easy to collect is the challenge!
You could summarize that data using some form of machine learning. A good new skill to develop. Then you don’t need to share the exact details, just a count per category. E.g. personal incident (32), late take off duty to X (23), passenger medical incident (15). Hopefully in aggregate form that data is less of a privacy issue and less of a commercial risk for your company.
While we were explaining to passengers why we couldn’t go, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realise that airlines can (and do) fly with certain things inoperative, but only under very specific, pre-defined rules.
I wrote up a bit of insight into how the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) works, hope you enjoy reading!
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