Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Pond Scum

Last week I was having lunch with a friend and the subject of chosen professions came up. While he was very happy that as a lawyer he has a relatively high income, he was a little disappointed that people were generally predisposed to think of him as pond scum until they got to know him.

Way back on my first job out of college, I had my own experience as pond scum. The design team I was working with was testing a Flight Data Acquisition Unit (FDAU) that we had developed. Somewhat similar to the black box recorder on commercial planes, the FDAU was designed to record dozens more flight parameters specifically to provide airline management with aircraft flight performance and detailed sensor readings down to the second. Got a pilot with a lead foot who thinks he’s still flying F-18s off a carrier deck? The FDAU could make a complete flight profile including a record of every engine rev, yaw, pitch setting, and gulp of fuel. The FDAU was basically Big Brother in a box.

We were at an airline maintenance depot in the middle of Oklahoma. As the new guy with no dependents, I was chosen as the patsy to go up and test the FDAU. I probably should have considered it an honor, but I was apprehensive. At that point in my life, I had been on only two or three scheduled airline flights. Suddenly, there I was sitting in the cockpit jump seat of a 747 at 39,000¢, about to do everything you never want to do in a 747.

The only people on the plane were the three-person flight crew and me. It was very obvious that they weren’t happy about the prospect of having any flight profile recorder that might challenge their professional credibility and get them called on the carpet every time they over-revved an engine. They decided that the white-knuckled newbie engineer in the jump seat needed to understand that, while all these new sensors might record things, it was still the pilot who did the flying!

The purpose of the flight was to provide some real-time data for the FDAU. What that consisted of was completely up to the captain and flight crew. I got a definite understanding of what that meant when the captain turned toward me and said, “Obviously, if you bloody engineers are looking to record exceptions to the normal flight procedures, then we better do some abnormal procedures.” With the “s” in “procedures” barely out of his mouth, the 747 banked hard right. I would have thought the wings would rip off during a move like that, but the plane handled it well. I was still pinned to the wall by the g force when we suddenly banked hard left.

After a few more of these, what I can only describe as, crazy eights, we climbed to 44,000¢ and dove. While I can’t recollect that I experienced real weightlessness, I had a very distinct feeling of being in a whale doing things that whales absolutely don’t do.

Then, the captain decided to remind his jump seat passenger about mortality as he put the 747 into a vertical stall. There aren’t many events in life that you’ll absolutely never forget, but this was one of them for me. Think of being in something the size of an apartment building climbing at a rate of a couple thousand feet per minute, and then reaching a point where it starts bucking, won’t go any higher, and feels like it is about to fall backwards. Then, to regain stability, you have to peel off into a dive. I was glad I had been warned to skip breakfast.

Landing was the final event in this experiment, which the flight crew clearly enjoyed at my expense. Just as we are approaching the runway, the captain turned toward me with both hands raised and said, “Watch, no hands!” Forty-five seconds later, the 747 touched down on the runway while his hands were still in the air. The crew laughed at my ashen color and horrified expression. The captain continued, “You can relax. This 747 can land itself. It’s just another bloody electronic box trying to do my job!”

I came away from that flight with a couple new understandings. First, commercial planes must be built a whole lot better than I had ever thought. Second, the flight crew put me on the spot because they were personally affected by the use of the FDAU. Because I was an engineer associated with this particular product, I was now pond scum. Basically, when it gets personal, people blame everyone on the food chain.

Recently, I read an article that called us (engineers) pond scum again for putting too much capability into a product that is being used for the wrong purpose. The device in question is an airbag event data recorder (EDR). Originally intended as a single-event airbag trigger, EDR architecture and technology closely resemble the function of a flight recorder that records all of the driving parameters up to and including a crash. These crash event data recorders are now being subpoenaed and used against car owners in accidents.

Design capabilities aside, the issue to be solved with EDRs isn’t the engineering, but personal privacy rights. Until that is settled, an EDR can and will be used against you because there’s one group of professionals who think you shouldn’t have any privacy when it interferes with making their case. My friend aside, it’s no wonder there’s a lot of pond scum to go around.