FOQA, flight operations quality management, and FDM, flight data monitoring, are key benefits from the growing digitalisation of aviation. But what are they, what do they do, and how do they work with the rest of aviation’s tech agenda? Join us for the latest in our ab initio primer guides!
Capturing, processing and analysing the wealth of data that is collected on every single airliner flight to improve aviation safety has shown the power of aviation digitalisation to drive real change within the industry.
There are two key areas of activity within this work, which has principally operated as a voluntary yet recommended way for operators to drive safety improvements.
Operational flight data monitoring, FDM, involves routine capture and analysis of flight recorder data. In North America, this is usually known as FOQA, or flight operations quality management, and has been recommended by the US Federal Aviation Administration and other regulators for a decade [PDF].
Flight data analysis, FDA, is the process of analysing this data — for goals that span both safety management and quality assurance, explains Mark Millam, director of technical programs and events at the Flight Safety Foundation.
“FDM programs allow for identifying hazardous conditions that have been detected during flight in order to improve the safe operation of the fleet,” Millam tells us. “While initially used for flight operations, the data captured can also help to provide analytical analysis of engine and mechanical component performance for improved maintenance.”
These are inherently digital programs, which have grown and continue to grow outside a simple set of analyses for flight exceedances or breaches of the safety envelope to analysing behaviours, norms and standards — and indeed recommending improvements.
“Airlines and pilots are interested in knowing what hazards may have been present on individual flights and exceedances of aircraft operating limits or company policy,” Millam explains. “Many of these programs are established and governed by a collaborative arrangement between the airline management, labour groups and the civil aviation regulator with oversight responsibility.”
Using the ARINC data bus, these systems capture many of the same kinds of data that are also recorded on digital flight recorders. Over the decade or so that these programmes have been in place in at many different airlines, the process for extracting the data have improved substantially, from quick access recorders enabling data saved on memory cards to be swapped out during aircraft maintenance overnight, all the way to modern wireless connectivity options.
The benefits of FDM are widespread and sometimes surprising
One key area where FDM has helped to improve safety is around the approach and landing phases of flight, including changing the way that air traffic management procedures are implemented.
“Flight data monitoring efforts around the world have helped to create greater efficiency and safety through improvements in overall stable approach performance, which helps to mitigate a number of approach and landing phase accident causes,” Millam says. “The results of these programs have also had similar improvements on ATC procedures for specific controller handling and approach procedures. One of the greatest situations is the approach paths that have been improved to avoid terrain where it has produced ground proximity warnings when aircraft have been slightly outside the optimum flight path.”
There are, of course, challenges to overcome. Many of these have been at the boundary between human trust in systems, cultural acceptance of quality assurance, and in some ways a kind of expansion of the concept of crew resource management to include feedback from outside the flight deck in the interest of safety.
“Perhaps one of the most interesting,” Millam notes, “is the cultural shift that occurs as carriers learn to accept the use of the data, pilots can trust in the program, and real results are shared with the workforce.”
As one example, the Flight Safety Foundation recently conducted a business aviation conference, with participants GE Digital contributing some work around analysing landing g-forces based on runway position.
“Turns out,” Millam says, “while some pilots may believe they are providing smooth landings for their passengers they can compromise runway distance remaining for very little gain. When pilots realise this from the data, more pilots work to land closer to the beginning of the runway and help to avoid the possibility of drifting to the side or further down the runway, risking an overrun.”
Coordination of FDM activities, including at a regulator and cross-regulator level — such as EASA’s European Authorities Coordination Group on Flight Data Monitoring and European Operators Flight Data Monitoring forum, bringing together a variety of actors from operators, operator associations, crew associations, manufacturers, hardware and/or software vendors, researchers, educational institutions, and various levels of regulator — allow the sharing of learning and best practice across silos and borders.
Predicting a predictive future
Like much of the future of aviation digitalisation, next developments are looking towards taking predictive and predicted action. Here, that revolves around identification, analysis and resolution of higher-risk situations at increasingly early stages of their development.
“In the next generation of aviation when both the volume of traffic is higher and the types of vehicles — including remotely piloted and autonomous — are more complex,” Millam says, “we expect to see more complex methods for sharing this data across the airspace. We then may be able to expect more trending across a number of airspace users and more proactive and predictive corrections to operations that will not take months of study.”
The Flight Safety Foundation is currently working with NASA to research and develop these kinds of operations, including around the In Time Aviation Safety Management Systems (IASMS) for urban and advanced air mobility.
EASA’s Operators FDM forum, meanwhile, is focussing on advanced algorithms for takeoff performance and approach path management, best practices on FDM analysis techniques, and is leading on two key tasks from the European Plan for Aviation Safety around FDM alignment, best practices, documentation, implementation and the relationship between FDM and safety management systems.
In many ways, the FDM agenda is a prime example of aviation safety building on its historical strengths in analysing incidents and near misses to identifying best practices and learning from all operations.
Author: John Walton
Published: 18th August 2022
Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
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