Flight Data Monitoring’s Path Forward: Safety Plus Sustainability 

What is flight data monitoring? How does it tie into your existing safety management system? This article by James McKenna at the AerospaceTechReview.com explains

Flight data analysis providers are expanding their portfolios of services to help aircraft operators derive more value from the flood of information streaming off their flights every day.

Companies like GE Digital, Scaled Analytics, AirSync, CloudAhoy, Collins Aerospace, and Polaris Aero and others are focused primarily on helping aircraft operators identify potential flight safety risks through programs like flight operations quality assurance (FOQA), flight data monitoring (FDM), and overarching safety management systems. These help operators develop measures for avoiding or mitigating those risks.

Aircraft operators — commercial and business aviation ones — are confronting economic pressures from Covid-19’s lingering suppression of travel, as well as persistent labor shortages and rising inflation. They also are working to meet social and political pressures for reducing their flights’ harmful effects on the climate and making their operations more environmentally sustainable.

The data analysis firms are broadening their flight safety focus to help customers meet those economic and sociopolitical pressures — and increase their value to customers — through smarter use of flight operations data.

“We’ve really started to see, particularly on the airline side, the expansion of the use of this data,” Luke Bowman, senior product manager at GE Digital, said. That prompted the company to update FlightPulse, its fully configurable modular electronic flight bag app, to let pilots access their individual operational efficiency metrics and trends after each flight. This allows an airline to “deputize the flight crews to be part of the sustainability journey. There are a lot of things that pilots can do to operate more sustainably.”

Likewise, Kanata, Ontario-based Scaled Analytics eyes expanding its services. President and CEO Dion Bozec founded the Canadian company in 2014 to establish a modern, easy-to-use, affordable flight data analysis service.Flight data analysis by GE Digital indicates business jet pilots all but ignore collision warnings from their aircraft’s TAWS, even if IFR weather and at night. GE chart.

“Safety doesn’t sell, so we’re looking at doing other things with the data,” Bozec said. “Fuel usage is a big one. CO2 emissions is another thing that’s on our roadmap.”

THE PAYOFFS

Flight safety data analysis does have payoffs. GE Digital analyzed 14 years of flight data for business jets from its Corporate FOQA (C-FOQA) service. It found that pilots fully or partially ignored 97 percent or more of callouts from terrain alert and warning systems (TAWS) that their aircraft was about to collide with ground, water, or obstacles.

Controlled-flight-into-terrain (CFIT) crashes are among the world’s top persistent safety concerns, along with runway incursions, loss of control in flight, and midair collisions. Numerous organizations consider preventing CFIT crashes a top priority. Although not the most frequent, CFIT crashes account for a substantial number of fatalities.

GE Digital looked at it 889,886 flights involving 1.85 million flight hours and 3,200 airports in more than 190 countries. Fifty-five aircraft makes and models were included, 60 percent of which were large business jets and 20 percent of which were mid- or super-mid-sized ones.

Of 28,421 TAWS alerts analyzed, the study found that pilots only responded fully to 2 percent of TAWS cautions and 3 percent of more serious TAWS warnings, which alert flight crews to imminent collisions. Pilots did not respond at all to 80 percent of TAWS warnings and had what GE Digital called a weak response to 14 percent (74 percent and 24 percent, respectively, for TAWS cautions). In 3 percent, pilots responded opposite to what TAWS advised (1 percent for TAWS cautions).

More disturbing, perhaps, is that GE Digital found that pilots failed to respond to virtually all TAWS alerts while flying in instrument-flight-rules weather or at night.

Those findings contrast with GE Digital’s assessment of pilot actions following warnings of collisions with other flights from traffic alert and collision avoidance systems (TCAS). Pilots responded in some way to 94 percent of TCAS alerts.

“One of the things that we’re focusing on now is that risk of CFIT and the TAWS response,” Bowman said. “We have the data over many years, and there hasn’t been a meaningful change in those risks.” GE Digital presented its findings at the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) annual Business Aviation Safety Summit in May.

FOQA

FOQA, according to the FAA’s airline-focused Advisory Circular (AC) 120-82, is a voluntary safety program designed to allow operators and pilots “to share de-identified aggregate information with the FAA” so that it can monitor “national trends in aircraft operations” and focus resources on operational risks in flight operations, air traffic control, and airports. FOQA’s goal is to enable operators, pilots, and the FAA “to identify and reduce or eliminate safety risks, as well as minimize deviations from the regulations.”

FOQA traces back to 1960s efforts by British Airways and TAP Air Portugal. In 1992, the FSF defined an industry standard for such programs and coined the term FOQA. AC 120-82 was adopted in 2004. FOQA by then was being adopted by business aviation. GE Digital in 2007 launched its C-FOQA program. CAE Flightscape followed suit in 2009.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) describes FDM as “the routine collection and analysis of flight data to develop objective and predictive information for advancing safety.” That involves continuously recording flight parameters, routinely collecting that data, and processing it to extract safety-relevant information, such as operating procedure deviations.

“We talk a lot about FOQA and FDM, and everybody goes, “Well wait a minute. What’s the difference?” said Robert Rufli, newly appointed director of operations for the Washington, D.C.-headquartered Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF). “The reality is nothing. The whole thing ties together as part of the safety management system that you as an organization have.”

That foundation is beta testing an FDM service for its more than 290 member companies. The test is using AirSync’s Bridge telemetry unit setup and CloudAhoy’s post-flight debriefing app and services. It includes two light jets and one turboprop because it specifically aims to support aircraft that may not have had quick access recorders (QAR) installed. AirSync’s setup can extract data from Garmin devices through a USB connection.

Rufli, who is ACSF’s past chairman and was Pentastar Aviation’s flight operations vice president, will oversee the FDM service and other safety activities.

Read the full article here

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