A “tool” created by NASA scientists to alert airline
analysts to potential, unanticipated problems and to enhance
safety and reliability in the industry is available for
licensing.

Scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center (ARC), Moffett
Field, Calif., developed a “Morning Report” of atypical
flights. It automatically identifies statistically extreme
flights to airline flight operations quality assurance (FOQA)
analysts. The new software may help analysts identify the
precursors of incidents or accidents.

“The Morning Report offers a promising method for identifying
unanticipated problems and opportunities in flight data
recorded by commercial aircraft,” said Thomas Chidester,
Aviation Performance Measuring System manager at ARC. “The
Morning Report implements concepts from flight science and
statistics into practical applications usable in industry,”
he added.

“Our goal is to focus the limited time of experts on
analyzing the most operationally significant events, while
broadening and deepening their analytical capabilities,”
Chidester said. “The challenge is finding and understanding
key information from the mass of data generated by aircraft
and collected by data recorders,” he said.

Only a small portion of the data generated by flights are
analyzed through the identification of situations where
aircraft operate outside pre-defined ranges. The Morning
Report tool may be able to interpret more aircraft data for
improved analysis. Unlocking information contained in data
sets has the potential to enhance safety, reliability and the
economics of flight operations.

The Morning Report tool has attracted the attention of
industry-leading providers of flight data analysis software,
looking to improve their analysis tools. SAGEM Avionics of
Grand Prairie, Texas, is the first to license the technology.

“The licensing of this analysis tool from NASA to SAGEM
Avionics is another shining example of how NASA developed
technologies are transferred to the private sector to help
benefit the American people,” said Lisa Lockyer, chief of the
Technology Partnerships Division at ARC.

The tool provides airline quality assurance personnel with a
list of atypical flights in an easy tabular format,
highlighting the most extreme five percent. These flights may
include groups of flights experiencing an operational problem
or unique situations encountered by single flights.
Highlighted flights are examined by FOQA analysts to
determine whether they represent operational problems.

The Morning Report tool was developed by NASA’s Aviation
System Monitoring and Modeling project under the Aviation
Safety and Security program. NASA’s Aeronautics Research
Mission Directorate, Washington, manages it.

For information about the Aviation Performance Measuring
System and the Morning Report, visit:
http://apms.arc.nasa.gov/

For information about NASA on the Internet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov