FOQA or flight operations (or operational) quality assurance is a buzzword in aviation, promising safety benefits based on analysis of flight data to identify issues and trends that are headed in the wrong direction.
Many flight operations use SOPs (standard operating procedures or practices) to establish consistency in flying and consequently improved safety. But how to be sure that pilots are adhering to the SOPs? That’s the job of flight data monitoring and its analysis function FOQA.
The equipment needed to record flight data and the software for post-flight analysis is expensive and not available to many aircraft operators. Only airlines, larger fleet operators, and well-off corporate flight departments could afford to participate in a FOQA program. That is, until products like CloudAhoy’s P-FOQA came along.
For many years, CloudAhoy has been improving its post-flight debrief system, which recreates flight parameters based on a surprisingly slim set of data, starting with recorded GPS information. Since its launch in 2011, Lexington, Massachusetts-based CloudAhoy has helped pilots review their flights and over the years, CloudAhoy has added improvements and the capability to analyze the increasingly data-rich recordings from modern avionics. This led to the development of CloudAhoy’s next product, pilot-focused FOQA or P-FOQA.
Essentially, P-FOQA takes the CloudAhoy debrief system and adds, according to the company, “the additional capability to identify potential risk events, to analyze and visualize aggregated data, and to notify pilots, safety personnel, and fleet managers.
The integration with CloudAhoy Debrief provides an efficient way to identify the root cause of potentially risky events, increase pilots’ awareness, and facilitate learning—resulting in becoming a better, safer pilot.”
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