I remember the first time I went on a flight with a friend who has a pilot license. We got out to the plane and he brought out a checklist and spent what seemed like an eternity checking what seemed like everything in order to make sure we had a safe flight. While it seemed like overkill at the time I came to the realization that if something goes wrong during a flight there are not a lot of options, at least compared to something going wrong while on terra firma.
If the check engine light goes on while driving your car, or something doesn’t sound right, you can usually pull over and try to diagnose the issue. Some people choose not to pull over and some choose to ignore the issue hoping it will just go away. That rarely works out as expected, however it rarely results in lowered life expectancy.
Pilots quite simply cannot ignore such issues. In fact there are many issues related to flying that, once found, will ground the aircraft until the issue is resolved. The FAA as well as other global regulatory bodies have created some very strictly enforced guidelines to that effect. I for one wish to thank our FAA overlords for doing so.
In recent years, due to the explosion of e-enabled aircraft, the FAA has created some cybersecurity regulatory requirements that aircraft manufacturers and commercial airlines must comply with. One of these requirements is to collect security logs from each and every flight and analyze the data in order to determine what security issues may pose a potential threat. This is very good with one significant exception. The frequency at which the security logs are analyzed and acted upon can be quite long due to the challenges associated with log analysis. To use an analogy, the “check engine” light does not receive information in anything resembling real time. If a security issue manifests itself in an airplane, it could be months or even years before it is discovered, and often, due to data fatigue, some issues may never be caught until it is too late to do something about them.
Airlines are well aware of this, and it is how we became aware of this. Our first task in creating WaveDash was figuring out a way to prepare the data to load into our application in order to process it into understandable and actionable information. We worked very closely with our airline clients to build an application that did this efficiently and effectively. We have been given the opportunity to iterate on this issue due to the fact that our airline clients do indeed take this very seriously and want to make their jobs as efficient as possible. It is still a work in progress, but we have dramatically increased the frequency that the log data can be processed and presented.
However the industry still has a long way to go. As with anything new it takes some time and effort to get to a point where problems can be identified and addressed in a timely manner. The willingness to get to this point is certainly there, and WaveDash is committed to helping the industry achieve this. Let us be your partner as we continue to build the best log analysis software in the industry.
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