The US FAA is planning to fund a two-year flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) demonstration for six small airlines to satisfy a legislative mandate.
As part of the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, the agency has been tasked with finding out how it can help "air carriers with smaller fleet sizes to derive a benefit from establishing a [FOQA] program", according to a recently published market survey issued by the FAA. The broad suite of safety measures in law was developed in the aftermath of the fatal 2009 crash of a Colgan Air Q400 on approach to Buffalo, New York.
FOQA programs are voluntary and use post-facto data collected on flight data recorders for safety analyses designed to identify potential flight safety risks, which, ideally, are then fed back into training programs. In return for sharing data with the FAA, carriers with approved programs are generally guaranteed protection from enforcement actions that would normally accompany the errors or incidents reported.
"The primary purpose of this demonstration project is to determine the feasibility of implementing FOQA for Part 121 air carriers with small fleets," says the FAA, adding that "small fleets" is defined as having 15 or fewer aircraft. "A secondary purpose is to provide the FAA with information that will aid the FAA in determining how it can best assist all such operators in establishing such programs."
The agency is seeking a company to run the three-year project, at least two years of which would include data collection from pilot FOQA programs at six small airlines. To augment the "limited resources" of small airlines, the FAA says knowledge and lessons learned from major air carriers, more than 30 of which have approved programs to date, can be used in the program.
"Success will not depend on solely placing equipment and software within an airline," says the FAA. "It will depend on whether a fully functioning FOQA safety system and culture can be established where information is produced and used for the betterment of airline safety and as an integral part of a safety management system (SMS)".
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
