There is a lot of talk about data sharing as the next big safety challenge, with good reason: Data sharing is the key to achieving the next level of safety, and data sharing is really hard to do.
Accidents often have their roots in fairly obscure events. The most recent example is the crash of Air France 447. The pitot-tube failures and airspeed anomalies that initiated that tragedy were so rare that a single airline, even a big one, would not have been able to amass enough data to see it coming. Yet after the accident, when everyone shared their information, a dozen or so similar cases jumped out. We have been striving for proactive safety management for nearly two decades, but our data are still walled off. We can never really predict the next failure until those walls are broken down.
So why don’t we just all get together and do it? Probably because it is a lot harder than it looks. It is tough sharing data between just one airline and its regulator. In many countri…
