Winner: Jeppesen
Location: Englewood, Colorado, USA.
Achievement: A simple but highly effective development to help pilots remain familiar with the world's more exacting airport approaches, by making the charts on which they rely more readable.
To help address an identified need within the airline industry to improve safety during airport letdown and approach procedures, Jeppesen has developed a simple, yet effective airport qualification and familiarisation service.
The service was designed to improve pilot-situational awareness, especially for airports with exacting approaches. It includes the provision of large, full-colour photographs and descriptive airport area information, allowing pilots to remain familiar with an airport on a continuing basis, as opposed to viewing a video on an annual basis.
Pilot-situational awareness has been further enhanced through the addition of coloured terrain contour information on charts.
The Awards judges were impressed with the fact that this service was making a major contribution to air safety, despite its simplicity, availability and relative low cost.
While the service is primarily aimed at airlines, Jeppesen says that it has also been widely embraced by corporate and private pilots. The US National Business Aircraft Association has recommended that all corporate pilots use the service to become more familiar with destination airports.
Jeppesen introduced the service in 1994, with a few charts in the USA, but it was expanded dramatically in 1995 to include the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, South America, the Pacific, Alaska and Europe.
Virtually all US carriers use the new charts, which have become the industry standard, while several large international carriers are also adopting them, citing their ease of use.
The terrain contours are included on Airport Qualification and Familiarization, Area and Terminal charts. Simulator flight tests were carried out to determine the best colours for contour depiction.
Finalist: US Federal Aviation Administration
Location: Washington DC, USA
Achievement: Leading an international stand against countries which were failing to police air safety standards.
In early 1995, the US Federal Aviation Administration took the potentially controversial action of banning airlines from countries where international safety standards were not being adequately policed.
Not only did the FAA take a brave lead in raising the issue, but it has also managed to spur the aviation community into action at an international level. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has since announced that it intends eventually to assume responsibility for assessing compliance with its published standards, fulfilling for the international travelling community a major objective of the FAA's work on behalf of US air travellers.
The Awards judges noted that the FAA, with the support of ICAO, now has backing from the international community for its efforts to assess compliance with oversight standards. They stressed that it was "…about time someone stood up against poor safety standards".
The FAA describes the result of its assessments as "disturbing". About 50 countries received assessment visits by teams of FAA specialists. Of those, only 52% were found to comply with FAA oversight standards, with nearly half of the remaining nations having "virtually non-existent" safety oversight.
The agency made efforts to encourage ICAO to establish a safety-assessment programme aimed at remedying these deficiencies.
The FAA claims that the programme has "…served as a major catalyst in moving forward the safety agenda", as many governments have been educated on their responsibilities. The FAA has also made a commitment to support the ICAO Assessment Program, by seconding a specialist personnel and allocating priority training.
Finalist: BFGoodrich Rosemount Aerospace
Location: Burnsville, Minnesota, USA
Achievement: Development of a wing-ice detection system which alerts pilots to the presence of on-ground icing.
BFGOODRICH Rosemount Aerospace, in co-operation with Northwest Airlines, McDonnell Douglas and FBS, has developed a system to detect ice and other contaminants which could adversely affect take-off performance.
The system, called the HALO, uses ultrasonic sensors and is designed to provide pre-take-off information to pilots, alerting them to any build-up of ice or contamination or breakdown of de-icing fluid.
A revenue-service evaluation was carried out to show that ultrasonic waves can be used to monitor the external surface of an aircraft for anti-icing fluid breakdown and detect contaminants A full-scale production version of the HALO is under development.
Source: Flight International
