Turning numbers into pictures often happens at a late stage, or as an afterthought, within aviation safety processes, say several specialists involved in U.S. government-industry system safety efforts and accident investigation. Awareness of revolutionary data visualization techniques has accelerated, however, among analysts and investigators. The implications affect sifting through vast volumes of recorded flight data for operator-level insights, generating tables and charts from the templates built into worksheets or databases, and replaying individual aircraft events with flight data animation software, they said.
Instead of expecting aviation safety analysts or accident investigators to focus first on raw data, then graphically communicate analytical results, data visualization facilitates and guides analysis from the earliest stage. Some specialists noted that overlaying data on geospatial/terrain imagery in Google Earth Pro, ESRI ArcGIS or equivalent software offers this capabil…
