If you hear someone at .conf26 shouting "gear down, GEAR DOWN" across the show floor, you have found us.
The Splunk4Aviation booth is exactly what it sounds like. Proper flight controls, three screens, an aircraft on approach, and a queue of people convinced they can do better than the person currently in the seat. Come and show us your inner Top Gun or find out whether you are the one person on the show floor who can genuinely land an airliner. What most people do not expect is the other half of the stand: every input you make, every foot of altitude, every degree of bank and every second of the run is streaming live into Splunk while you fly.
Between the three of us we have spent more than twenty five years working inside an airport before joining Splunk, so the sim was never just a toy. It is the fastest way we have found to explain what we actually do with aviation data.
Two challenges, two very different data problems
The Low Altitude Challenge is the one that draws the crowd. Speed is handled for you, so all you have to do is thread a jet through a valley at Riffe Lake without meeting the scenery. It is you, a route, and your nerve. The telemetry tells the real story afterwards: how low you actually flew, where you drifted off the optimal line, and the G-force you pulled trying to correct it.
The Landing Challenge is the one that humbles people. We built this one ourselves as a custom activity, and you get everything you need to fly it properly: thrust, flaps, gear, speed brake, reverse thrust and wheel brakes. An airliner, some altitude, and a runway. Bringing it down is one thing. Stopping it on the tarmac is quite another.
Each run takes three to five minutes, which is roughly the length of a good conversation about data. We will be running both challenges across the week, though only one at a time, so check the stand for what is flying when. If the queue is for the wrong one, come back later and try the other.
Where the telemetry stops being a game
Here is the part we enjoy explaining most.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was never designed to talk to a SIEM or an observability platform. There is no integration, no supported add-on, no vendor to call. So we wrote our own collector, pull the telemetry out of the game with it, push it straight into the HTTP Event Collector, and surface it in Dashboard Studio with a one second refresh.
That is the whole point. Because that is precisely the problem airports and airlines bring to us.
An Airfield Operational Database, an x-ray screening system, a walk through metal detector, a hold baggage system, a car park barrier: none of them were built with analytics in mind, all of them are absolutely stuffed with events, and every one of them is happily keeping that data to itself. If you can get an unsupported flight simulator into Splunk in a way that produces a live operational dashboard, you can get an AODB in.
Once the data is flowing, the parallels get uncomfortably close to the real thing:
- Every run is a set of timestamps. Start of taxi, take off, top of descent, touchdown, full stop. Aviation runs on exactly this. A-CDM milestones like TOBT, AOBT, ATOT, ALDT and AIBT are just timestamps, and on-time performance is nothing more than the gap between two of them. Show someone their own run broken into phases and the penny drops on turnaround analytics almost immediately.
- Descent rate at touchdown is a real KPI. Airlines analyse recorded flight parameters for unstable approaches and hard landings as a matter of routine. Our scoring is a much friendlier version of the same idea, and it makes the concept land in about fifteen seconds, no pun intended.
- The debrief matters more than the score. After each run we can pull up a Pilot Debrief dashboard showing the route flown, the score at each checkpoint, altitude held and min/max G, and export it as a PDF for the pilot to take away. That loop, run the operation, review the data, change the behaviour, is the single most valuable thing we have seen airports do with Splunk. Gatwick put live performance dashboards in front of their security teams and saw throughput change simply because people could see how they were doing. Dubai Airports monitor around 200 data points per bag and target 95% of passengers through security in under five minutes.
- We monitor the thing generating the data too. There is an OpenTelemetry Collector on the gaming PC feeding host metrics into Splunk Observability Cloud, so we can show the game telemetry and the infrastructure underneath it side by side. Airports care about this a lot. Every operational system sits on servers, networks, databases and, increasingly, OT that somebody has to keep healthy.
- Everything lands normalised. We publish an Airports Common Information Model built from IATA, A-CDM and AIDX conventions, plus an Airport App for Splunk with example searches and a use case library. Same principle as any CIM: name things consistently once, and every dashboard, alert and report afterwards gets easier.
What to expect on the stand
- Both challenges running across the week, with a live leaderboard on the big screen
- A personalized debrief of your flight, which you are welcome to frame or hide, depending on how it went
- Prizes for the top pilots, plus swag including our exclusive Splunk Flight Tags
- Demo’s including the Splunk4Airports App, ITSI for Airport Operations, Splunk Observability Cloud and the Splunk core platform.
- Three Splunkers who genuinely like talking about aviation data (and one that REALLY likes baggage systems!), and who will happily go as deep into aviation data as you want to go.
You do not need to work in aviation to enjoy it. Plenty of people who have flown the sim work in retail, finance or manufacturing, and the conversation ends up in the same place: what data are you sitting on that nobody has bothered to bring in yet, because there was no obvious connector for it?
Bring your best flying. We will bring the dashboards.
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Four days of hands-on technical content, and one aircraft that needs landing.
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