An Inter-airline safety information exchange (SIE) between users of the British Airways Safety Information System (BASIS) has been so successful that BA may have to subcontract its administration, says the BASIS chief Capt Mike Holtom.
The BASIS is an airline-operated personal-computer (PC) database system for recording safety incidents and detecting trends. The SIE, a secure system for exchanging confidential information (with identification removed) about operational, maintenance and technical incidents, is used by some BASIS operators. Holtom says that more than 60 airlines are involved in the SIE. At the last exchange, in October 1996, data from 17,000 incidents from the previous 12 months were presented. After merging, the data are distributed to SIE members. For security, the system works through quarterly presentation of information on disk.
A range of new optional modules to expand the BASIS' areas of application and analytical capabilities, and a system software upgrade, were presented at a recent BASIS-users' conference at London Heathrow. The upgrade entails changing to Windows from ASR version 6. Additional modules available now or shortly include:
Maintenance Error Investigation, "-a structured method of investigating an event where maintenance error has been found to be a contributory factor";
Flight Instrument Replay: this module, along with Maxvals, is available only to those BASIS users who download flight-data-recorder or quick-access-recorder data into their BASIS systems, and enables the user to see a computer reconstruction of the flight instruments as they would have appeared to the pilots at the time;
Aeronet: this is a secure private communications net provided by aeronautical telecommunications company SITA. BASIS users are considering using it to exchange safety data on-line.
Source: Flight International
