[emanuer]

As being part of a software development team working on RPS (runway performance) I can tell you, it is stories like this which keep us up at night.

The amount of business logic involved is staggering, but miraculously there are experts who truly seem to understand almost all of it. Understanding “almost all of it” is not enough, so there are several different experts who in their entirety hopefully capture 99.99…% But you don’t know what you don’t know…

One of the “calming” facts is, that in the tens of thousands of test cases we compared our results to existing solutions, we did discover errors in their calculations. The “calming” aspect is, due to the many safe-guards these errors seemingly never surfaced.

Coming from a machine-learning background I quickly understood that there is little appetite for AI solutions, as any optimization which would reduce fuel consumption, is easily offset by all the safety margins. In my mind the goal of the software is to make everything explainable and proof that you truly did think of every eventuality.

I am very curious to learn what major f*-up lead to planes being grounded.