If you could travel back in time (something Turbo discusses inside this month’s edition) to continue your work as a flight test professional, but you can’t tell anyone that you are from the future, and further suppose that all you brought with you is your memory, what would you work on? And would it be easier or harder than you think?
I encountered this interesting thought experiment in a blog post that made several profound observations, but one really stood out: “The idea of taking the output of a function and sticking it back in, over and over, is really simple. But nobody looked into it deeply until around 50 years ago.”
Sometimes we overlook simple ideas.
People have written whole books about why we should not overlook simple ideas. In this month, however, you will not find a whole book, but you will encounter a short op-ed introducing a simple idea that is statistically rigorous. It applies to complex and complicated fields alike, including the intersection of artificial intelligence and flight test which continues to emerge.
This month’s editions highlights a formal accident report of an autonomous flying car crash and two more sundry observations from my ongoing survey of flight test news. Finally, Turbo assigns homework, and the pdf of the newsletter includes three attachments in the paperclip menu of adobe acrobat.
So if you slow down long enough to enjoy this edition, let us know by email.
Download Flight Test Safety Fact 21-03.