UA B737 MAX aircraft evaluation #103
Description
United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX Aircraft Data Evaluation
United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are adding new instruments, resulting in an increasing number of aircraft observations being received. The original plan was to receive approximately 400 new tail numbers within a short time period.
We are monitoring the growth of these data in the NC004004 tank—tracking size, number of subsets, and processing time. Aircraft observations in this tank represent U.S. data that have been decoded. To assess the impact of these data, we compare them against the list of tail numbers received from the providers, which helps us identify new observations.
Initial Evaluation (January 14–18, 2025):
- 36 unique tail numbers were observed, 40,350 UA B737 MAX observations were recorded.
- About 3% of UA B737 observations were of poor quality—comparable to, or better than, other aircraft datasets.
- Total amount of this data represented approximately 2% of all U.S. aircraft observations in the GFS model.
- No obvious outliers were identified among the tail numbers.
It was agreed that if data volumes remained consistent (up to ~50 tail numbers), the data could be moved to production by changing the headers from IUAX91 KARP to IUAX02 KARP. This change would direct the data to the b004/xx004 tank.
Observations were introduced to production suite from March 2025
By April 2025, the number of tails increased to 52.
By early June 2025, approximately 178 tails were reporting.
