Closer collaboration with the aviation industry and greater use of aviation data has driven a transformation at the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing it to focus more on mitigating future risks and less on investigating accidents, says a top FAA safety official.
In a speech made in Washington, DC on 8 July, FAA associate director of aviation safety Peggy Gilligan says the agency's safety arm has entered a new era characterised by proactivity.
"We still learn form accidents and incidents, [but] the difference is we are not in the position where we have to wait for something to go wrong to make advances in safety," Gilligan says during a lunch held by the Aero Club of Washington.
She did not address issues like the current debate about cockpit video recorders or tamper-proof avionics, and touched only briefly on the agency's ongoing study of pilot mental health.
Instead, Gilligan devoted much of her remarks to what she describes as a "new chapter" at the FAA one in which "prognostics" and voluntary reporting systems are helping head off risks before accidents occur.
"The data lets us identify the hazards and the mitigations that need to be taken," she says.
The transformation has been years in the making, Gilligan says.
She notes that the high-profile 1982 crash of an Air Florida Boeing 737-200 into a bridge and Potomac River near Washington DC sparked greater public interest in aviation safety.
That accident and a number of others attributed to icing spurred criticism of the FAA for having a "tombstone mentality" being more focused on learning lessons from accidents than on preventing them.
"It appeared to the public that accidents were a trend that was escalating," Gilligan says. "Change was needed."
The FAA ended the 1980s having received more than 400 safety recommendations, including many from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Government Accountability Office. The agency spent the early part of the 1990s "scrambling to address" those recommendations, Gilligan says.
The came the 1996 crash of a ValuJet McDonnell Douglas DC-9 into the Florida everglades, an accident caused by a series of oversights that ultimately resulted in an inflight fire ignited by a chemical oxygen generator.
That crash and others - notably the inflight explosion of Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight 800 the same year demonstrated the "intricate route to probable cause", she says.
In other words, aviation had moved into an era where "there is no common cause for commercial airplane accidents".
In the new era, the FAA began focusing less on "forensic" accident data and more on collaborating with airlines, collecting safety data and creating voluntary reporting of safety issues.
It also set and subsequently reached a goal to cut the aviation accident rate by 80%, says Gilligan.
"We find ourselves with the kind of problems we always wanted to have: When your accident numbers are so low that you are looking for problems so you can fix them in advance."
Source: Cirium Dashboard
