Advanced Flight Data Analysis

The commercial aviation industry provides the safest form of transportation in the world. Nevertheless the pressure for continued improvement in safety will remain in response to the predicted growth in both passenger and freight traffic volumes. One of the most important tools to improve the safety of flight operations is to have a Flight Data Monitoring program implemented. Such a program obtains and analyses data recorded in flight. The prime objective of such a program is to detect deviations from flight manual limits and standard operating procedures. The use of flight data for these purposes employs only a very small fraction of the data generated by the on-board recorders. Every routine flight generates an enormous amount of data that are never used. The analysis of routine flights introduces a wide range of new possibilities and problems to airlines. This paper describes the activities of the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR regarding the development of techniques and ideas for analysing routine flight data. Based a number of reallife examples a comparison is made between traditional flight data analysis and advanced flight data analysis. Ideas for correlation of flight data with other available data sources are discussed. It is concluded that the extension of monitoring flight exceedances to the day-to-day data analysis of each flight is important to the goal of continued improvement in aviation safety. Even more can be expected from the correlation and analysis of human factor data and environmental data with flight data up to the level of day-to-day operations.