Airliner "Boeing 787" generates 500 GB for each flight

Airlines will have to upgrade their IT infrastructure, because new generation airplanes generate very large amounts of traffic. For example, Virgin Atlantic CIO David Bulman said that the new passenger plane Boeing 787 Dreamliner generates more than 500 gigabytes of information during one flight that needs to be stored and processed.

According to him, literally every key node of the airliner is connected to the network, including engines, flaps and landing gear. If there are technical problems with any of the modules, then the engineers will know about it in advance and are ready for repair even before the landing of the aircraft. All nodes in the aggregate generate approximately half a byte of data during a single trip. Some of this information is transmitted to the base in real time directly during the flight.


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The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a new-generation airliner that should replace the old Boeing 767 on the market. At the moment, 49 copies have been built, the retail price of each ship is from 206 to 244 million dollars, depending on the modification. The model 787-8 with 210 passenger seats and the “extended” model 787-9 with 250-290 seats are considered the main ones.

Due to the fact that the aircraft generates such large amounts of data, airlines have to look for technical resources to process it. Thus, the airline Virgin Atlantic plans to organize its own data center ("private cloud"), as well as to rent public cloud services to handle unclassified technical information. The company tried to create its own solution based on Hadoop, but the attempt did not end in success due to the lack of qualifications of the programmers working for the airline, said David Bulman. Now Virgin Atlantic is negotiating with companies that provide hosting and data processing services.

According to the CIO, one cannot do without one’s own data centers. Airlines also need to prepare for an increase in the flow of other information, for example, passenger baggage is automatically processed using RFID tags. Over the past year, information flows at Virgin Atlantic have doubled, and in the future they can grow at even faster rates.

In fact, airlines turn into IT companies, that is, their main task is information processing. Similar changes are occurring in many other industries. As a result, the demand for programmers in all sectors of the economy is expanding.