During the September 1997 meeting of the Icarus Committee, an expert team affiliated with Flight Safety Foundation, members agreed to form the Safety Index Working Group to develop a safety-metrics model with which an airline can monitor and measure operational safety performance. The model developed into a software system called the Flight Operations Risk Assessment System (FORAS).1
The goal in developing FORAS was to create a quantitative index for proactively assessing aviation risk, focusing on the recognition of risk factors involved in aviation safety instead of emphasizing accident rates. Full technical details were published in 2009.2 FORAS developers adopted a mathematical model to synthesize a variety of inputs (risk factors), including information on crew, weather, management policy and procedures, airports, traffic flow, aircraft and relevant operations.
In FORAS, risk assessment is tackled with a divide-and-conquer strategy. A given risk category is…
