Twenty U.S. airlines routinely analyze parameters of airplane operation captured by their flight operational quality assurance (FOQA) programs.1 Sixty-one have processes to rectify safety deficiencies identified by narrative reports submitted by pilots through aviation safety action programs (ASAPs).2 These airlines for years have had measurable safety improvements, but none has had — until 2008 — a robust way to compare its safety performance indicators with industry benchmarks or with broader trends identified through the new Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) program, a collaborative effort of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and private-sector partners.
The FAA and airlines now have the capability to cross-query de-identified aggregate data distributed across private network servers and corresponding data on government servers. ASIAS analysts then make sense from results of this fusion of numerical data and narrative-…
