Meridian's predictive-maintenance program needs engine-sensor readings to keep arriving continuously from in-service aircraft rather than being manually collected in periodic batches uploaded by ground crew. What should the data engineering team design to support this need?

Designing data feed mechanisms for continuous data flow means building automated ingestion — telemetry streaming from aircraft sensors directly into the pipeline as it is generated — rather than relying on periodic manual uploads. This is foundational to predictive maintenance, where the value proposition is catching an anomaly before scheduled maintenance would have caught it; a quarterly or monthly manual process reintroduces exactly the delay predictive maintenance is meant to eliminate. The quarterly manual data-collection process led by ground crew and the printed logbook that engineers transcribe into a spreadsheet monthly both describe manual, infrequent processes that undercut the initiative's core purpose and reintroduce human bottlenecks and transcription error. The single one-time data export used to seed the model and never refreshed provides no ongoing data flow at all, which would leave the model static and unable to detect new patterns as the fleet ages or conditions change. For the exam, recognize 'continuous data feed' as a specific, named data-engineering deliverable distinct from the broader pipeline construction (next enabler) — feed mechanism design is about how data enters the system in the first place.