Pneuma: A Large-Scale Real-World Time Series Benchmark for Commercial Aircraft Predictive Maintenance

Summary

Predictive maintenance is vital for commercial aviation, yet progress remains hindered by the lack of public, large-scale real-world datasets. As a result, most methods are developed and evaluated on proprietary data, limiting reproducibility. We introduce Pneuma, the first publicly available large-scale benchmark for predictive maintenance using onboard time series from in-service commercial aircraft. Built around bleed air systems, Pneuma contains over 920 million multivariate time steps across four aircraft types and 9 verified fault scenarios, directly aligned with real maintenance logs. The dataset exhibits key real-world challenges, including substantial class imbalance, subtle fault evolution patterns, and significant variance across aircraft configurations. We structure the benchmark around three tasks: multivariate forecasting, supervised fault classification, and unsupervised anomaly detection, with labels derived from actual maintenance records. Under unified settings, we evaluate over 25 models from four methodological families on 9 carefully curated subsets. The results reveal that even strong contemporary models struggle with subtle fault signatures. Further analyses show consistent gains from additional in-context examples and multivariate inference, while forecasting quality is strongly associated with anomaly detection performance. Together, these findings provide practical insights into effectively modeling complex real-world aviation time series. We hope Pneuma will serve as a rigorous and reproducible foundation for advancing data-driven predictive maintenance toward real-world deployment in commercial aviation.