MITRE and the FAA have teamed up with the aviation community to recruit general aviation members for a program that has been helping airlines proactively identify and address safety risks. By 2015, as a result of these outreach efforts, 60 individual pilots and aircraft owners and 17 business operators had voluntarily contributed 12,000 safety reports and data from 17,000 flights. The outreach effort was part of Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS), which is a collaborative program between the FAA and the aviation industry. ASIAS participants share their operational and safety data so that it can be collectively—and anonymously—analyzed for safety trends. Operators provide their data to MITRE, where it is securely stored and checked for data quality before being analyzed.
For general aviation pilots and owners who lack the equipment to capture flight data, MITRE developed an app—the General Aviation Airborne Recording Device (GAARD)—that they can use to record data about their flights and upload it to ASIAS for analysis. An expansion of GAARD—called fleetGAARD—will enable fleet managers of business aircraft to collect data on every flight in the fleet’s operations. This app will expand data collection efforts even further to make the skies safer.
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