CONFIGURABLE FLIGHT SAFETY SYSTEM FOR TRENDS AND STATISTICS ANALYSIS OF AVIONICS SYSTEMS-AN EMBEEDED PERSPECTIVE OF AN EFFICIENT FLIGHT SAFETY TOOL

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) policy on Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) indicates that FOQA is a voluntary safety initiative encouraging airline participation in FOQA. It is in the public interest with a necessary requirement that Airlines must document procedures for taking corrective action, when necessary in the interest of safety and airlines must provide FAA with access to aggregate trend data. FAA issues final FOQA rule, in what it called a major step towards reaching its “Safer Skies” goal of cutting the commercial aviation accidents rate by substantially. FOQA programs currently are conducted by airlines, certification authorities and engineering groups of airlines. FOQA is primarily a data collection, processing and analysis system used to improve the various disciplines of flight operations. The Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) onboard provides a wealth of information for rest of the analysis. This information can lead to improvements in aircrew training, maintenance and conduct of safer flight operations. The system can analyze and report the various events, exceedences and reports including statistics for the airline operators. National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), Bangalore has designed and developed a software tool called NALFOQA, which is being used by major airlines in the country for flight safety operations and quality assurance activities. Airlines that have started using NALFOQA system have documented a great deal of financial benefit, operational efficiency, reduced insurance premium, better safety levels as well as improved training and safety of operations. NALFOQA focuses on the criticality issues to expose the hidden aspects of flight safety part of aircraft information management system in terms of its design criticality, flight operational features with justified usage, quality assurance facts and figures as focused on the recorded data and a voluminous types of reports, charts, graphs and statistical information for very effective flight operations with professionally documented results. The paper presents the methodology of data processing for various fleet of aircrafts with controlled parameter limits and conditions with logical envelops bounded by derived mathematical approaches for the trends and statistics of various systems and components of aircraft using NALFOQA. The quality assurance in terms of flight operations and avionics system diagnostics is realized by flight data analysis, which is the heart of the system. This Paper also presents about the flight safety issues of the aviation industry in particular to the quality assurance areas of aviation using the techniques of data processing and database management for the history of each and every aircraft including the engineering database