Airbus Helicopters has introduced a new analytics service that draws on a range of data sources to support operational safety.
An application known as Flight Analyser helicopter flight data monitoring (HFDM) analyses aircraft data post-flight to identify risks before they lead to incidents.
The aim is to automatically detect situations that could have been safer or could have potentially led to an incident or accident, Airbus Helicopters said.
Data such as altitude, ground speed, vertical speed, height and engine parameters feeds into the application from on-board sources including the ISEI Helicom system, the Appareo Vision 1000 flight data recorder, and the Outerlink IRIS data recorder.
The system then augments this data with weather data and environmental context, such as sky coverage and obstacles present at the time of the potential event, to build up as complete a picture as possible. It also performs a confidence check for each event, assessing the reliability of the data.
“What we’re doing is helping our customers uncover issues that would have been near impossible to see in the raw data,” explained Gilles Bruniaux, head of Aviation Safety at Airbus Helicopters. “Being able to make sense of this rich data and learn from it so as to fly in a more informed way the next time represents another step forward for safety.”
Flight Analyser users get access to dashboards that are updated post-flight, and the output can be used by an organisation’s safety management system to support future decision making.
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Tags: flight data, flight safety
