After the BLDGBLOG lecture at UCL last week, Mark, Russell, James and myself retired to the Malborough Arms for post-match analysis; and Russell dropped on us the fact that Roll-Royce’s jet engines are now prolific bloggers.
They twitter about what they are doing back home to Derby from wherever they are above the globe, 33000 feet up.
At the risk of sounding a bit like one of the guest publications on “Have I got news for you”, here’s a quote from Aviation Maintenance Magazine that Rusell found to back-up his pub-fact
“Engine diagnostics, and predictive analysis that our technical people are doing, feed into the operations control room, the hub of global fleet support for large engines, to see how they are performing, combined with flight log monitoring.”
The company is able to monitor 3,000 engines in real time, collating technical data streamed via satellite in flight.”
Of course, there must be an entire swathe of giant things that blog, and have been blogging since the dawn of telemetry; but it still seems faintly magical.
Petafloptimism 
Dear Twittering Engine,
I think you will find my brain and my IQ are the biggest things that blog around here. You don’t know what your raving on about.
Yours truly,
Gigantic Prof Scrub
http://www.profscrub.com
That’s fantastic. That’s also the promise of Building Information Modelling (BIM) too, in terms of live feeds from buildings.
Fascinating stuff.
Cranes work the other way – they’ll drive up the motorway to your site quite happily, but unless the hire company can see the funds in their account it’s just a useless lump of metal. And then, at the very moment the hire period begins magical signals are sent between the crane and HQ and the controls become active.
(I guess for safety reasons it doesn’t work the same at the end of the hire period – but someone will have done the sums to see if it should…)
Sad to be the voice of in such illustrious interaction company…the fact is over 50% or Rolls-Royce’s business is now servicing and management..they make more cash from knowing when it may break down than building it in the first place. Though unlike your average car where its inconvenient when you ignore the computer telling you you need a service, it means people die if RR ignore it.
Wonder if they could do a delayed live stream of engine analytics of the flight you are on..screw the where you are on amp feature in-flight!..show me my engines performance.