Using Information Technology to Aid Safety in the Aerospace Industry

Using Information Technology To Aid Safety In The Aerospace Industry.

Official: 153 on plane, at least 10 on ground dead after Nigeria crash ... This was the news headline on CNN.com just this past Sunday 6/3/12. Given the topics for this week, I decided to look into the role and impact of IT in the aerospace industry especially as relates to safety.

It is estimated that more than half of the air carrier fleet flying worldwide are out-of-production aircraft. Many of these aircraft are operating beyond their model design service objectives. Cooksy, K. et al (2001) discussed aircraft airworthiness management which takes place for the commercial air carrier fleet as a result of the FAA certification of intact aircraft nondestructive inspection and information technologies systems that were originally developed for the Air Force. The inspection and information management technologies facilitate rapid fault detection and fault assessment. The four paramount issues that confront the operators of aging aircraft fleets are widespread fatigue damage, corrosion, structural repairs and nondestructive inspection. The FAA-certified advanced technology system is a multiplicity of automated inspection technologies in which digitized images of an intact aircraft structure are collected nondestructively and the resulting images overlaid and analyzed by computer. When design and manufacturing faults are detected through trend analysis and corrected early in an aircraft production run, the cost savings to the airline/operator can be in the billions of dollars. Trend analysis from intact aircraft nondestructive inspections can easily be used to identify inadequate design and improper manufacturing processes. The airline industry can take advantage of the increased safety, cost savings, and accident rate reduction offered by automatic intact aircraft NDI and remanufacturing processes.

The FAA publishes accident and incident notices. The table below lists the accident and incident data categorized by aircraft type and manufacturer. The values in each cell represent the number of events for the corresponding category. An asterisk (*) indicates that the data was revised since its original posting.

Categories Date Notices Entered

Jun

6

Jun

5

Jun

4

Jun

1

May

31

May

30

May

29

May

28 May

25

May

24

All Aircraft Events 8

9

23*

11*

19*

17*

41*

5*

7

Fatal Accidents 2

4*

2

2

1

5*

1

Experimental/Homebuilt 1

7

2*

6*

4

6*

1*

Miscellaneous 1

1

1

FIXED WING

Airbus 1

Boeing 3*

1

1

1

Bombardier

Beech 2

1

1

3*

1*

Cessna 1

5

1

3

2

13*