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Speech

RTCA Symposium 2008

Good afternoon, everyone. It truly is a pleasure to be here today for the 2008 Symposium and to be with so many people who do so much for aviation.

You may have noticed that FAA has been in the news over the past weeks. It has been a busy time for us. And, it is in the context of the recent congressional hearings and the intense media focus on FAA programs and policies that I especially welcome this opportunity to talk with you. Because, behind all the questions and beneath all the headlines, the real issue under discussion is the role of the regulator.

That is what I want to talk about this afternoon:  The role of the regulator and, specifically, the role of the regulator and Aviation Safety in the 21^st century.

First, a bit of historical perspective, and a look at aviation in the 20^th century, is entirely appropriate for an RTCA gathering. This organization has done important work over the years to help develop consensus-based standards — standards that have helped bring aviation to where it is today.

We’ve come a long way in 81 years — from March 1927 when the federal government’s role in aviation regulation began. That was when the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce issued Aircraft Type Certificate Number One to the Buhl Airster, a three-place open biplane. The following month, William P. McCracken, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics, received pilot license Number One.

It did not take long for the aviation community to recognize that there was more — much more — to assuring safety than issuing certificates and licenses. Early on, our predecessors knew they needed to learn from their mistakes.

In 1928, the Commerce Department established an Aircraft Accident Board. It was a very busy time for those five board members. In just the first six months of 1928, there were 390 accidents. At the same time, there were fewer than 3,700 pilots.

Think of that ratio of pilots to accidents. Would any of you enter a profession with that level of risk?

How did we get from an annual ratio of one accident for every five pilots to where, for the past 70 years, aviation safety has improved by a third or more every decade?

How did we get to where — over the past five years — air carrier accidents with on-board fatalities have occurred at a rate of about one in every 15 million passenger flights?

How did we get to where we can “safely” say that we are in safest period in the history of powered flight?

• This strong record is due to the regulatory framework, our system of laws.
• It is due to the many lessons learned from accident investigation.
• It is due in great part to technological advances.

Yet, I must give a major share of the credit for today’s remarkable safety record to dedicated safety professionals in government and in industry working together.

Working together:  The FAA and the aviation community have a long heritage of partnership. That heritage goes back to at least 1935 with the creation of the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics. What is now known as RTCA was formed to assist in the technical development of aeronautical radio aids.

Working together also includes a host of committees on rulemaking, such as the Aviation Rulemaking Advisory Committee, or ARAC, chartered in 1991 as a standing Federal Advisory Committee, as well as a wide spectrum of limited-duration Aviation Rulemaking Committees, or ARCs.

We’ve created ARCs in recent years to provide recommendations on specific topics. As an example, we just established an Aviation Rulemaking Committee on Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems. It will begin meeting soon.

The proof of partnership is in our shared history. Just as the industry and FAA’s predecessor agencies worked together to craft safety standards for the introduction of ILS, VOR, RADAR, jet transport airplanes, Category II and Category III operations — today, we work together to enhance the safety and capacity of the NAS through implementing ADS-B, Area Navigation, Required Navigation Performance, and Enhanced and Synthetic Vision.

Working together also includes the party system for accident investigation. The National Transportation Safety Board invites qualified technical representatives of organizations with a specialized knowledge to join in the field, fact-finding portion of an accident investigation.

It has been through accident investigation that we have learned so much about what can — and did — go wrong, and from that information the aviation community then figured out how to fix it.

This was the case with mid-air collisions and TCAS, with CFIT accidents and TAWS, with wind-shear accidents and ground-based Doppler radar, among many others.

Technology developed from what we learned from accidents has brought considerable benefits, and these benefits continue to contribute to today’s remarkable safety record.

And, yes, even with a low accident rate, we will continue to investigate accidents when they occur.

There is still more to learn, and with the greater complexity of today’s aircraft and systems, there is always the chance that a change intended to enhance safety (or increase capacity) could have an unintended and serious consequence.

The good news is that fatal air carrier accidents are rarer and increasingly one-of-a-kind. The aviation community — with its intense focus on improving safety — has largely picked the “low-hanging fruit.” We have addressed the repetitive, common causes.

This is why we often hear that air carrier accident rates have reached such a low level that we should no longer expect sudden and sustained breakthroughs in future rates.

I disagree.

The aviation community is on the threshold of reaching the next level in aviation safety. The keystone to the next series of breakthroughs:  Using safety data to identify remaining or previously undiscovered risk. And the only way we can effectively gather the needed data is by working together.

Let me explain.

Air carriers, in the course of their normal operations, obtain aviation safety data from several sources, including voluntary disclosure programs, such as the Aviation Safety Action Program, or ASAP. ASAP encourages employees to voluntarily report safety information.

ASAP programs go back to 1994 when American Airlines signed the first ASAP MOU with its pilots. Under that program, an American Airlines pilot, for example, could report something about an approach that he made to, let’s say, O’Hare. The report would provide valuable information and could lead to American’s flight department making improvements in its procedures and crew training.

But, as they say about Las Vegas, what happened at American Airlines stayed at American Airlines.

O’Hare would be safer for American Airlines pilots making that approach with the new procedures and the changed training. But, what about the dozens of other carriers who fly into O’Hare? They would not have the benefit of the information submitted by the American pilot. Their risk at O’Hare would be greater.

Until now.

Today, with the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing initiative, or ASIAS, led by FAA’s Office of Aviation Safety Analytical Services, we are able to gather more crucial safety information. And, more importantly, with sophisticated data analysis tools FAA is able to detect trends, assess risks, and prioritize mitigations. Furthermore, we are sharing this vital information across the community.

Let me offer a real-world example of how we have used analysis of data to make a big difference in safety. After the August 2006 accident when an airplane took off from the wrong runway at Lexington, Kentucky, FAA’s newly formed Aviation Safety Analytical Services staff reviewed 5.4 million records from a number of databases.

This examination uncovered 116 wrong runway departures involving commercial air carriers over the previous 20 years. We dug deeper. In a Wrong Runway Study, we found that certain airports had common elements and/or physical characteristics that could lead to confusion.

For example, runway thresholds that terminate in a large apron area can be confusing to pilots.

Other common elements that can contribute to crewmember misunderstanding include a short distance between the airport terminal and the runway, or a complex airport design, or the use of a runway as a taxiway.

Or, all of the above.

We used these findings to call the aviation community together for last year’s FAA Call to Action on Runway Safety. At that session, after seeing the findings and recognizing the safety implications, various elements of the community stepped up to make voluntary — not Government-mandated — safety improvements.

That is just one example of the power of collecting, analyzing, and sharing data. The power of data is why FAA and the aviation community initiated the ASIAS safety analysis and data sharing collaboration.

ASIAS leverages internal FAA datasets, airline safety data, publicly available data, and manufacturers’ data, as well as other data. In addition, ASIAS participants cover a wide range and include FAA, NASA, The MITRE Corporation, manufacturers, and eight major airlines who provide data from their ASAP Programs and their Flight Operational Quality Assurance, or FOQA, programs.

The airline safety data is de-identified, aggregated, and safeguarded by MITRE to foster broad participation.

Public data sources include the National Transportation Safety Board, Aviation Safety Reporting System, National Weather Service, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, among others.

As for the airline data, ASAP, in particular, is one of the most proven sources. ASAP has grown from that one program at American Airlines 14 years ago to today’s 166 ASAP agreements in place for pilots, mechanics, dispatchers, and flight attendants distributed across 69 airlines, as well as with mechanics at five major repair station organizations.

Currently, reports from flightcrews from the eight participating airlines are included in ASIAS. Future plans include the addition of de-identified reports from maintenance and dispatch personnel and from flight attendants, as well as reports from FAA air traffic controllers and manufacturer employees.

The whole point of ASIAS is ensuring that we get smarter — much smarter — about having the right information to make important safety decisions.

It would be irresponsible and reckless to wait for the next accident to make additional safety enhancements.

In order to reduce the accident rate — especially with the forecast growth — we must move to a “prognostic” or preventive approach. As I said, we will always use our forensics, after-the-fact tools, but with fewer accidents and more complex systems, the challenge now — and increasingly in the future — is to take preemptive action and prevent accidents.

To do this, we need critical safety data. Just as important, we need analytical expertise to do predictive analysis to discover trends and identify precursors. And, we need to share what we learn.

This is exactly what we are doing.

The goal of ASIAS is fusing, or bringing together, the data and then, as we did with the wrong runway analysis, leveraging the power of data analysis to help reveal emerging threats and hazards.

Without a proven problem, it is a challenge to know which data points are simply that — data points — and which ones are important and could be a potential accident precursor.

This is why the ASIAS team is focusing on pushing the science of advanced data analysis, and it is why the team is fostering the development of cutting-edge data analysis tools to find emerging threats, as well as identify previously undiscovered risks that are buried in terabytes of safety information.

Detecting these risks before an accident gives us an advantage we have never had — the ability to act in advance to mitigate risks and prevent accidents.

Yet, it is not just isolating pieces of data. Combining information from different data sources may provide insight into an underlying problem that would not have been possible by analyzing individual sources of safety information. For example, we can “fuse” textual safety reports with digital aircraft FOQA data, along with radar flight-track information to create hybrid databases. Then we use these databases to examine the interaction of aircraft terrain warning alerts and minimum vectoring altitudes.

In the future, these “hybrid databases” can themselves be combined with other data sources to provide still more ways to detect and understand risks. This will move us forward into a new dimension of prognostic safety analysis.

As Malcolm Sparrow, author of The Regulatory Craft puts it, with ASIAS we can do what we are supposed to do as safety professionals. With data, we can “pick important problems.” And we can “fix them.”

It sounds deceptively simple, but we all know how hard it is to prioritize safety initiatives.

More importantly, ASIAS will enable that game-changing move from forensics to prevention.

Yet, how does the preventive work — the cooperative work — we are doing with ASIAS fit in with the role of the regulator? Is it our place?

You bet it is.

As safety professionals, we must use every tool — especially the sharpest tools — available to enhance safety. It is entirely fitting that as a regulator, FAA foster new ways of improving safety, and that we create the infrastructure that can be used by and across the aviation community to improve safety. That is the role of the regulator in the 21^st century.

There will inevitably be times when there is ambiguity about the important problems and how to fix them. Yet, this is what is so important about data and analysis. For example, gathering and analyzing the data in the wrong runway analysis led us to the airports and to the issues that were causing the problems.

There’s a reason we are still quoting Alan Mulally long after he left Boeing to head the Ford Motor Company. He’s the one who said, “The data will set you free.”

Yes, it will.

ASIAS has brought key players to the table. Yet, for any partnership to be effective — from a marriage to a sports team to an Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing initiative — there must be a common goal.

We in aviation are fortunate. We share a common goal.

It is in all our best interests to make air travel safer for the millions of people who rely on us. Across the board, among all sectors, aviation is made up of good and talented people committed to find a better way.

The practical reality is that the only way we can reduce an already-low accident rate is to draw on our expertise and experience, use the sharpest tools, and work together.

This important work cannot be done in isolation. But it can be done together. And that is exactly what we are doing — today.