NASA Develops Tool to Prevent Airline Accidents

Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA, have developed "Morning Report" to alert airline analysts to potential, unanticipated problems, and to enhance safety and reliability in the airline industry. The software automatically identifies statistically extreme flights to airline flight operations quality assurance analysts, and may help them identify the precursors of accidents.

According to Thomas Chidester, aviation performance measuring system manager at NASA Ames, "The challenge is finding and understanding key information from the mass of data generated by aircraft and collected by data recorders." The Morning Report tool may be able to interpret more aircraft data for improved analysis.

The software provides airline quality assurance personnel with a list of atypical flights in an easy tabular format, highlighting the most extreme 5 percent. These may include groups of flights experiencing an operational problem, or unique situations encountered by single flights.

The tool has attracted the attention of SAGEM Avionics of Grand Prairie, TX, a provider of flight data analysis software, which has licensed the technology.

For more information on the Morning Report software, visit: http://apms.arc.nasa.gov/.>