I used to be a car audiophile of sorts. It was mainly about the highest tweets and lowest subs. Surprisingly my hearing didn't get permanently damaged, though I did crack a windshield and shake off my rear view mirror a few times. I still have one of these in my garage...
On a recent road trip, I introduced my kids to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon. I realized during the intro to Money that the right half of my speakers weren't putting anything out. I hadn't noticed prior to this, since most of the music I listen to now is on the radio and is really just noisy filler for my commute.
Unlike my faulty right door speaker, a pilot might notice more if the right half of their aircraft wasn't putting out any power. I don't think they would even need any instruments to tell them something is wrong. A few years ago, there was a frequently quoted IoT statistic put out about Boeing 787's creating a half-terabyte of data per flight. That's about 12,500x the amount of data a plane from 1977 might generate.
After all this data is generated, the results need to be interpreted by the plane's computer, the pilot, and ground crew and actioned on. Sometimes in real-time, sometimes even predictively. Perhaps 85% of the data could be considered noise. That's still about 75GB of data to scan for each flight. If it's text data it could be shrunk down to under 10GB. Not quite big data anymore if we get rid of the noise.
I couldn't find a sample of this data, though I did find this report on Noise data for the first 17 months of Boeing 787 operations at Heathrow airport.
According to the study, the Dreamliner is 3-8db quieter than similar aircraft. That's about the equivalent of someone breathing, though I guess at sustained time intervals and multiplied by the number of aircraft in flight it could make a difference. The study might have been helped (or hindered) by including some visual and audio samples for reference.
Rather than capturing hundreds of statistics and spending months and countless dollars studying flight patterns, a great gig in the sky, the better metric might have been "is it quieter than the Concorde?"
How can we determine signals from so much noise?
