I came here to say that my father works for a company called MTU Areo Engines as an FAA RS-DER. What that means is he can write and design repairs for the hot-s

I came here to say that my father works for a company called MTU Areo Engines as an FAA RS-DER. What that means is he can write and design repairs for the hot-sections of most engines. Why this is interesting, and related to this story is something that comes along with that. All engine data that the pilot can see is available realtime on the ground at the repair stations. What this means is that an engineer can call up a GE-CF6 in the second position on the starboard wing and see how it is performing. While that might not sound all that interesting, there are literally tens of thousands of measurements taken a bunch of times a second and transmitted to the ground for each engine. For instance, if the flight was 10 hours (and every package was 100 Kb) they'd send about 35GB of data per engine. This is just the engine measurements. This does not include avionics, communication, position. Most of the information is propriety for how they store, transmit, and calculate these things so I do not know exactly how this works. I have seen one of these workstations and it is really impressive to know the exact RPM of the number two engine compressor is spinning at in real-time of a flight crossing the Atlantic. Also, you can two-way text-message with the pilot from this workstation to pass perceived information about the engine performance.