Push to share global safety data: leading role for Australia
AUSTRALIA is taking a leading role in a Flight Safety Foundation project to study ways of setting up a global system of sharing safety information.
Australian Greg Marshall, who has taken up the position of vice-president global programs at the foundation’s headquarters in the US, said the project would focus initially on the Asia-Pacific and pan-American regions.
He said it would seek to find a way of capturing the wealth of information collected across the globe by regulators, air safety investigators, airlines, other aircraft operators and navigation service providers.
“They’re collecting that information and they’re collecting it in various forms,’’ Mr Marshall said. “Some of it’s been shared and some of it’s not.
“I guess the secret is that if we can actually capture all of that data in a common form where it can be used, that would be extremely valuable to a number of organisations.’’
Mr Marshall said the foundation would initially survey what sort of information was available in the two regions, who has the data and what protections it was afforded. “We’re looking at what data is actually out there,’’ he said. “It could be from flight data monitoring, it could be flight track data, but probably more importantly the data streams that come from both the operators and the government safety reporting systems.
“We want to see what we can do with those to basically consolidate them and then eventually report them so everybody can share that information.
“That way you can see how a region is performing against certain safety measures and find where they can best focus their resources in improving areas of safety that might differ from region to region.’’ From a practical sense, Mr Marshall said the study would also look at the different systems being used by various bodies and operators, what architecture they used and whether they could talk to each other.
It would also look at whether information could be funnelled through a third-party system.
He believed Australia and New Zealand could take a lead in such a project because of the wealth of knowledge in both countries in managing and capturing data.
“And I think that organisations within Australia can certainly take a role in helping other regions in the development and implementation of a system that allows the sharing of that de-identified data for the betterment of everyone,’’ he said. Mr Marshall said de-identifying the data would be an important issue because of cases in some jurisdictions where safety has been used for judicial purposes or subpoenaed for civil cases.
While there were good systems in Australia and the US, there was still “a long way to go” in some other parts of the world.
“Once we identify where those deficiencies are, I think there’s scope … for a separate study to be done on data protection and how various jurisdictions can establish legislation to essentially protect that safety data,” he said.
“The story with submitting voluntarily is that if the data is suddenly then used in a punitive matter, it dries up the source of voluntary reporting. This is against the principles of capture and analysis for safety purposes.’’
The global data sharing study is one of several projects the FSF has under way. Others include a look at go-rounds with European air navigation organisation Eurocontrol and research firm Presage and, in the Asia-Pacific, work on upset recovery training.
“The intent there is to increase the awareness of upset recovery training and its effectiveness in unusual attitudes, loss-of-control states,’’ Mr Marshall said.
“So it’s being raised at that regional level, at least within the Asia-Pacific, and probably more broadly thereafter.”