My previous boss was professional aerospace engineer. She had worked for one of the two major airplane manufacturers and a satellite company before joining academia.
It was always interesting going to meetings across the US with her, because she refused to get on a plane. Often she would have to leave a few days before me (e.g., to get to Boston) due to taking a train or driving.
Why wouldn’t she take a plane? I’ll let her quote stand out:
“If you know how those things are designed and built, you wouldn’t ever get on one again either,” she would say, not joking. She said every plane is literally riddled with human error.
I believe her. (It’s one reason I trust LLM output more than my own, often times. Humans hallucinate more than LLMs and certainly can’t hold attention as long – in my experience.
And that’s why I’m always grateful when I’m on a plane that we have amazing airplane maintenance technicians. (It helps that my uncle used to work as an on-call maintenance troubleshooter for flights in duress while in air, and would talk the crew about things they could try to fix midflight to not crash and die. Yeah, he retired early… it was stressful.)
So happy Aviation Maintenance Technician Day! These people deserve to be celebrated far more than odometers in my opinion.
Ignorance is bliss, and one reason we can all be so ignorant about how just precarious commercial flight is comes down to our maintenance technicians. So let’s celebrate this day and be grateful that overall, things are pretty safe in the air. Phew!
Play Map HereNOTE: The first Version of this was to be a Euro-style card game with a map board of international flight routes. But wow, was it a snooze to play. I love Euro-style board games, and I couldn’t even stomach it. So I started over. The prompt below are the revision directions I used to create the final app.
New Prompt Web Mapper GPT
Can you refashion this concept entirely. Let’s ditch the board game idea. Let’s come up with a new idea, based on this theme, and refashion it as a simple 16-bit-style videogame where there are 1-5 flights circling around an airport and you have to click on things or solve simple little puzzles (with a mouse and keyboard) to help flights land. Should have a map of planes flying around an airport.
Please come up with a simple puzzle videogame overview, plan, synopsis, and structured JSON. The game should last about five minutes total. It should have little puzzles where you have to order shapes in certain patterns within a certain amount of seconds. Or you need to find airplane-based words in a word search. Etc. Something fun and simple to celebrate Aviation Mechanical Technicians. Thanks.