Flight Safety Foundation and National Business Aviation Association seek aircraft to take part in FOQA system trial
Trials of a flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) system tailored to corporate aircraft operators are to start in February 2005, says Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) technical director Jim Burin.
The FSF and the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) are working to get a participant fleet of 25 aircraft for the one-year trial, codenamed C-FOQA, and say they have so far attracted seven operators with 10 aircraft.
Also known as flight data monitoring, FOQA is widely used by airlines to detect flight operations anomalies or imperfections that could be corrected easily if anyone knew the problem existed. The essential on-board equipment for running a FOQA programme is a quick-access recorder (QAR), which costs about $15,000 to install and records more operational and engine parameters than most digital flight data recorders, so the up-front cost has to be justifiable.
There are other reasons why a small-fleet or single-aircraft corporate operator might find running FOQA difficult to justify, and the C-FOQA programme is designed to overcome these problems. One is that the data extracted becomes particularly revealing and useful when a large number of aircraft are involved, enabling trends, norms or divergences from the norm and repeated problems to be identified. So unless a scheme like C-FOQA for pooling de-identified data can be set up, it would not be cost-efficient for most corporate operators.
There are also technical limitations. A QAR can only be fitted effectively to types with a digital databus, which includes the Bombardier Challenger 604, Cessna Citation X, Dassault Falcon 2000 and Gulfstream lV. For the trial, the FSF and NBAA say they have attracted two operators with three Falcon 2000s between them, four operators with a total of six G-lVs, and an operator with a Falcon 900EX. All the operators except one are US-based, the exception being a European operator, says Burin, who adds that C-FOQA does not yet have a fractional ownership company signed up.
Apart from sufficient QAR-fitted aircraft, C-FOQA's essential components are a third-party administrator with the necessary smart software and data processor, and a data review team comprising the FSF and the NBAA.
DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
Source: Flight International
