Aviation Services

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” (William Thomson, Lord Kelvin).

Operational Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) and Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) are the exploitation of flight data to enhance flight safety by capturing, analyzing and visualizing aircraft data. 

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As an integral part of the airline’s Safety Management System (SMS), analysis of flight data provided by iATO aviation services allows operators to identify trends and fully investigate the circumstances behind both minor and major incidents. It also improves operational procedures and training by identifying areas that need to be addressed, raises awareness of safety issues within the company, and improves cost and training outcomes by reducing the cost of examining crew performance.  

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Data from aircraft is analysed at iATO Aviation Services to identify any planned exceedances. This is a specialist task undertaken by flight data analysts at iATO using sophisticated software tools. Once an event has been identified, a flight data analyst will review the data to confirm its validity, after which the flight safety officer at the airline further investigates the circumstances behind the event. Depending on the arrangements within the company, the pilot in command/flying the aircraft at the time of the event will be consulted by the flight safety officer or a union representative. This may result in a formal Air Safety Report (ASR) being raised or simply an enhancement of the FDM event report. Either way, the involvement of the pilot greatly improves the value of the report.

Benefits of FDM include:-

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• SOP monitoring

• Identification of top safety events

• Hazard identification

• Trend monitoring

• Training improvement

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