Data Mining for Flight Safety Gets Notoriety

The Washington Post published an article about how data mining has been improving airline safety titled "Avoiding Plane Crashes By Crunching Numbers, Data Mining Helps Identify Subtle Flaws". Staff writer Del Wilber's piece points out that data mining is part of the new era in the airlines industry, which has been without a major U.S. commercial aircraft crash since August 2006.

For ten years ProWorks has been helping major airlines to improve flight safety through secure safety reporting systems, performance monitoring systems and FAA approved flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) systems mentioned in the article.

These intensive large scale projects are generally unnoticed by the general public outside of the airlines industry. It is understandable, considering the nature of an effective safety system is to avoid abnormal and potentially hazardous events.

Currently, ProWorks is working on the Distributed National FOQA Archive (DNFA). The FAA managed DNFA system is designed to analyze data to identify trends from a single aggregated source of flight data and safety reports. Flight safety analysts are able to access the data while the integrity, security, and confidentiality of the original data sources is maintained.

Thank you to Del Wilber and The Washington Post for noticing how data mining is contributing to the absence airlines flight safety in the news media.