Even as Eclipse Aviation is promising a centralised, turnkey flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) system as a part of the total package for Eclipse 500 owners, the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) is setting up a similar system for business and corporate operators.
At present the FSF is trialling the system - dubbed C-FOQA - with volunteer operators. There has been a lack of interest in FOQA in the sector because most business and corporate operators are small, and as a result feel they would not generate sufficient operational data in-house to detect meaningful trends.
At the same time there was no centralised system for aggregating and processing data from the sector as a whole. This is where the FSF has stepped in. The C-FOQA system would provide a centralised, confidential system for processing sector-wide data downloads, providing not just safety benefits but also economies.
FSF executive vice-president Bob Vandel describes the airlines' long experience with the flight operations quality assurance system, known in Europe as flight data monitoring: "FOQA brings previously unknown problems to light before they become accidents or incidents, and it helps the air carriers to confirm and quantify problems they had only suspected. Tremendous savings - in maintenance and fuel costs for instance - also are achieved through the use of FOQA."
Source: Flight International
