Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) data can be incredibly crucial to Safety Management. With the integration of FOQA data, duplication of efforts in safety reporting can be prevented. Additionally, using FOQA data, airlines can combine fight data collected with safety reports to reveal operational inefficiencies as well as compare standard operating procedures to real-time actions.

What is FOQA?

FOQA is a voluntary safety program to increase commercial aviation safety. FOQA allows commercial airlines and pilots to share de-identified aggregate flight information with the FAA to perform trend analysis. Under Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations (14 CFR), part 193 information submitted to the Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) program is classified as "voluntarily submitted safety-related data," and FOQA information is protected from disclosure under 49 U.S.C 40123 and part 193. It may be released only with the written permission of the Federal Aviation Administration Associate Administrator for Regulation and Certification. Currently, the FAA uses this data to find safety gaps with trend analysis.

Pairing FOQA with SMS

Utilizing the integration of FOQA data in SMS software solutions is beneficial for efficient operations. The ability to tie specific flight data to a Safety Report as well as identify and review specific FOQA data for safety meetings can allow an airline to correlate and identify essential flight data quickly and effortlessly.

Most importantly, FOQA data can eliminate the duplication of efforts. By integrating airline FOQA data with SMS, flight data can be auto-populated into a safety report. With this integration, personnel will no longer need to manually input flight information that FOQA already captures. This will enhance safety reporting not just by saving time, but will encourage personnel to fill out reports as they will no longer need to fill out a large portion of the form with flight data. Outside of auto-populating data, FOQA alone can identify safety issues; for example, an aircraft performance issue can be identified with FOQA data, thus resulting in identifying maintenance issues before they ground an aircraft. FOQA can be used in tandem with safety reports to reveal operational inefficiencies, for example, a safety report identifying a late landing clearance which resulted in a rushed approach can be backed up and identified with FOQA data. Combining that with an integration of FOQA in SMS and the report can auto-populate that flight data. Additionally, FOQA can be used to compare actions in flight with the policies covering those actions to discover where additional training is needed organization-wide.

Conclusion

‍ Utilizing FOQA data with SMS will strengthen the safety culture of an airline with proactive data analysis and additional tools to identify, analyze, and act on safety events and organization training. Making the utilization of FOQA data streamlined and simple, while also encouraging safety reporting is the key to taking advantage of this asset.