Flight data monitoring is slated to be a key topic at the Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF) annual Safety Symposium this month as the organization hopes to build momentum for its recently launched program and encourage others to adopt such practices. The ACSF Safety Symposium will be held March 20-22 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

ACSF has scheduled a session that will include top executives from Mayo Aviation, GrandView Aviation, and Jet It who will discuss the challenges they've faced regarding the perception of FDM, how they overcame those challenges, the hardware involved, data analysis that comes with the program, and the safety and operational benefits.

Taking a page from its effort to develop its Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), ACSF president Bryan Burns said his hope is to foster similar success for its FDM program by word of mouth. “It’s a mirror image of what we did with ASAP 10 years ago,” he told AIN.

ACSF formally opened the program to participation this year after beta-testing it with three operators in 2022.

Frank Raymond, the director of safety for a Part 91 operation who is moderating the panel and formerly held the same title for ACSF, explained that the program is designed to help organizations improve their flight operations by using more data.

With ASAP, a voluntary reporting program, operators can learn what happened from the pilot’s perspective, Raymond said. FDM tells the operator what the airplane did. The programs can work together, he noted.

Many of its ASAP participants have FDM, Raymond said. “But we’re really trying to get folks that haven’t touched FDM and who are afraid of the cost and complexity. There are a lot of smaller operators out there that don't have the time, the money, the resources, to get some of these programs. That’s where [ACSF’s FDM initiative] started. How do we get these programs down to operators that typically wouldn’t have been able to afford them? How do we raise their safety game?”

ACSF looked to develop cost-effective solutions to reach those operators. “They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of these legacy programs, but for the cost, you're still getting access to data that you wouldn't otherwise have,” he said.

To get started, Raymond added, “you have to have the right safety culture.” Without a just culture in place, “FDM isn’t going to be in an environment where it can thrive.” ACSF also stresses the importance of training on FDM for both management and flight crews so they have a better understanding of what can they do with the data in a non-punitive nature.

“We want to provide training to everybody from the frontline to the C-suite on what FDM can and cannot do," Raymond said. "'This is how it should be used, this is how it should not be used.'"

Once the foundation is built, operators need to look at the aircraft and the avionics to know what type of hardware is best for the airplane. The right hardware is critical to getting the data off the airplane, he explained.

“Technology has gotten less expensive and more readily available,” Raymond said. “There are more options out there than there were 15 years ago when I started my FDM at another company.”

Among the partnerships in the program are AirSync and CloudAhoy, which can make FDM feasible for light jets, turboprops, and even piston aircraft. AirSync provides hardware options and cellular connectivity to get the data off the aircraft.

The data is then transmitted wirelessly to CloudAhoy, which provides the analysis. “That’s where we’re actually looking at the data,” Raymond said. CloudAhoy created a dashboard with graphics to provide a picture of what’s happening with the aircraft.

“The basic idea of FDM is that we're using aggregated data to look at our system," Raymond commented. "The goal, as a flight department, is [to ask] how are we flying our aircraft? Are we flying in accordance with the aircraft flight manual? Are we flying in accordance with our SOPs with the CFRs? So we really want to try to take it at a higher level and instead of looking at individual flights, we're looking at the aggregate.”

Crew members can debrief their flight right after they land and see where they can improve. But Raymond stressed that this is where training becomes critical. “That training piece is where we really want to discourage that mindset of, ‘I can go see how Frank flew the airplane today.’ That's not really what we're trying to do.”

The beta test ran for a year and Raymond said the feedback was positive. He worked with the operators extensively on how to interpret the data to detect trends.