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2026-10-04 · Africa Flying

Eleven days that built the pipeline: September in plain terms

The Earth photographed from Apollo 17 on 7 December 1972: Africa fills the centre of the disc, with Madagascar to the south-east, the Arabian Peninsula at the top right and Antarctic ice at the bottom, under swirling white cloud.
Africa from Apollo 17, 7 December 1972. A photograph, not a project image: it is here to show the continent this work is about.Credit: NASA / Apollo 17 crew (photographer: Harrison Schmitt); restored copy on Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain (NASA)

Africa Flying is a software project about a continent, so it seems right to begin an issue about our September with a picture of it. The photograph above was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. We did not make it and it has nothing to do with our code; it is there to remind us what the code is for.

The work itself can be summed up in two numbers. Between 20 and 30 September 2026 the repository received 114 commits, which are the small saved steps a developer makes along the way. And the project's automatic checks grew from 16 test functions to 871 over the same days. Those tests are small programs that run the real code and fail loudly when something stops working.

The effort did not arrive evenly. Most of it came on three days: 23 September, when thirteen software agents were hardened and tested; 24 September, when the data catalog was audited; and 27 September, when the neural pipeline, the education system and a tool server for language models were all built. The rest of the days were quieter, and the last day of the month had a single commit.

Two cautions keep these numbers honest. First, a count of test functions is not the same as the number a test runner reports, because one function can run many times with different inputs; the next posts give the runner's totals where they matter. Second, a count of commits says how busy we were, not how good the work was. The other nine posts in this issue are about what the work actually was, including the places where it went wrong.

Everything in this issue is software for the pipeline. Africa Flying is in a pre-operations phase: it is a simulation platform, and nothing described here is a flight operation.

The whole picture of what runs and what does not is on the status page.

Read next

The detail charts

These two charts hold the day-by-day counts. They are the secondary material for the two numbers above.

Bar chart of commits per day: 1 on 20 September, 25 on 23 September, 20 on 24 September, 5 on 25 September, 8 on 26 September, 49 on 27 September, 5 on 28 September and 1 on 30 September.
Commits per day, September 2026Credit: Africa Flying. Licence: Project content, draft; the numbers are the project's own records
Bar chart of test functions defined in the repository at the end of each day, rising from 16 on 20 September to 457 on 23 September, 605 on 24 September, 855 on 27 September and 871 on 28 and 30 September.
Test functions defined in the repository, end of dayCredit: Africa Flying. Licence: Project content, draft; the numbers are the project's own records

Sources and credits

Written for the Africa Flying blog, September 2026 issue. Pre-operations R&D: nothing described here is a flight operation.