Airbus Spent Two Years on a Fuel Pump Mystery Solved in Two Weeks
The problem was simple physics, fuel moving away from the pump as the plane climbed, and solving it saved $40 billion in orders.
Colossus · The PatriotAirbus engineers in Toulouse, France spent two years unable to explain why a fuel pump on the A380 kept failing.
Palantir sent engineers to work on site, people it calls forward deployed engineers. They organized the plane's sensor data in its software, called Foundry.
Within two weeks they identified the cause. On ascent, fuel sloshed away from the pump, leaving it with nothing to draw.
The article calls the fix trivial but does not describe what it was. It says the fix saved $40 billion in orders.
Questions people ask
What is Foundry?
Foundry is Palantir's commercial software for organizing business data. It connects separate databases, cleans up inconsistencies, and builds a shared model of operations so engineers and managers can analyze problems in one place.
What is a forward deployed engineer?
It is a software engineer who works at the customer's site rather than from the software maker's office. The engineer adapts the software to how the customer actually works and sends lessons back to the product team.