Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Thank you, Warren [Randolph, FAA’s Manager of Accident Prevention’s Integrated Safety Teams and Program Management Branch].  I’ve been looking forward to joining all of you at InfoShare this year.  This is my first time here, and I’ll be sitting in on some of the sessions this afternoon to get a feel for how the process works, and to see firsthand the benefit that comes from brainstorming together about potential problems.

Risk-based decision making is the way of the future. And it is one of our strategic initiatives at the FAA, which will guide our work for years to come. To make good decisions, you need good information. You need good data that points to the risks. That is why what you’re doing here today is so important. 

As you know, we’ve reached a point in aviation safety where commercial operations are safer than ever. This is in great part thanks to the work of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team and to carriers, manufacturers, labor, and the FAA working together to reduce hazards and risks. That teamwork, along with advances in aircraft safety and new regulations, reduced the commercial fatality risk in the United States by more than 80 percent over a 10 year period. 

We are building on that success through our expanding government-industry partnership with CAST and the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing program. CAST and ASIAS, and the work you’re doing at InfoShare, are vital to changing the culture of how we approach safety. It’s vital to transforming us from an aviation safety culture based on forensic analysis of accidents, to a culture that identifies risk and concentrates efforts on eradicating those risks from the system.

In order to determine risk, we need to identify problem areas, and to do that, we need information. We need to see patterns in the vast array of data. The type of information you feed into the various voluntary self-reporting programs is vital—the Aviation Safety Action Program for employees, and the Flight Operational Quality Assurance program for flight data.  Together with the info we provide through the FAA’s programs for controllers and Tech Ops, these efforts are essential and foundational to a new safety culture. I’m heartened to see the support for this kind of info sharing from operations folks, from the dozens of carriers here today, including carriers from overseas, and from our partners in labor and industry.

InfoShare means a willingness to give the FAA a look into your operations.  For my part, the push for increased data sharing is a pledge by the FAA that what you divulge will be de-identified and not be used against you.  I want you to know that I’m a firm believer in this process.  We need to create and sustain a safety culture where the continual pursuit of enhanced safety is more important than assigning blame. People need to share what they know without concern of reprisal or loss of competitive edge. Employees need to feel that they can raise their hand and talk about things that are troubling them. Safety is essential to what we do, and it’s also good business. If we’re not safe, nothing else matters. 

The entire goal of this conference is to find precursors to risk, to examine those hazards, and to get rid of them.  Certainly, training and professionalism are part of the equation.  But the information we get from data sharing is the foundation. And we are improving participation all the time.  Since 2007, airline pilots alone have submitted 150,000 voluntary safety reports.  The number of operators participating in ASIAS is currently 44, up from just four carriers seven year ago. The model to improve safety is the success that we’ve seen with InfoShare, ASIAS and CAST working in partnership. 

Last year, we took the logical next step and decided to apply the model to GA.  In March, we launched a one-year program to demonstrate what ASIAS could do to help the GA community.  This project will build on the process established by all of you for commercial aviation.  To do this, we’re working with local pilot groups in Arizona, and national pilot groups, manufacturers and NATCA.   We’re giving pilots a new set of tools to look at flight data. These tools will use applications for tablets or mobile phones to record real-time flight data.  GA pilots will be able to upload and analyze their own data and critique their own flight. Data submitted through these tools is confidential and de-identified. It will not be used for enforcement purposes; but instead, to improve GA safety.

The General Aviation Joint Steering Committee was essential to this work.  Although we have reduced the GA accident over the last 20 years, that rate has leveled off in the last few years. We need to redouble our efforts to keep it moving down and reduce the number of fatal GA accidents.  I’m pleased to see that GA is also establishing InfoShare for their communities.  On Thursday, the corporate members of the GA community are getting together right here to do just that to share safety information.

There are other examples as well.  As those of you from the Regional Airline Association already know, your pilots alerted us to a potential risk involving the way RNAV departures were programmed into flight management systems.  Through ASIAS, we were able to conduct an analysis that led to CAST adopting safety enhancements last year.  This includes improving the way that these departures are designed.  It includes improving the training of pilots and air traffic controllers when using these procedures. 

This reinforces something that intrinsically each of us already knows:  When all of us are willing to place our knowledge and experience on the table, we can significantly advance safety.

You’re also well aware of the work with Airplane State Awareness that’s come out of information sharing.  As aviation advances, so does technology. As we know, technology can change the equation.  It’s not unlike when I learned how to drive a car, which was a manual transmission… a Ford Pinto to be exact.  While learning, I was constantly paying attention to the speed, the tachometer, the sound of the engine and whether there was enough distance to stop.  Today automatic transmissions are mainstream, and we drive without concentrating nearly as much on these basics. Instead, drivers now benefit from newer safety features that remove blind spots, such as the live view on the dashboard that shows what is behind the car when backing up, and other features that can detect if the car is veering towards the road shoulder and correct the steering. Suddenly, driving has become a very different experience. 

To understand the effects of technology is not easy.  Better than two-thirds of recent loss of control events stem from attitude awareness or energy state awareness.  Were it not for the precursors we uncovered through the information you shared, we wouldn’t have realized this as quickly. The kind of information you are sharing is helping us prioritize our efforts to enhance safety in a targeted way.   

In fact as the FAA moves toward Safety Management Systems, we need to ensure all of us in the aviation community work together. In the future, there will be opportunities for both commercial aviation and GA to work together on problems that are common to both communities.

In closing, let me say how pleased I am to see such a full room.  I’m especially glad to see corporate and international participation.  There’s an increased involvement and awareness with the Directors of Safety, who are having their third meeting this week.  And the Directors of Maintenance are meeting for the first time here at the conference. 

Meetings like this give us all a chance to talk about best practices and continuously refine the top issues.  I appreciate the work all of you are doing and more importantly, I appreciate very much that we are doing it together.  I’m looking forward to joining you this afternoon.