Description

Aviation Performance Measuring System (APMS) is an advanced software analysis tool to ease the large-scale implementation of flight-data analyses and interpretation within each of the air transport users. APMS technologies enable airline carriers to analyse the flight data in order to identify safety trends and increase flight reliability. Advanced tools look beyond events within individual flights to identify systemic problems through statistical analyses of many flights. APMS development of advanced tools has three major thrusts that moving beyond exceedance-detection to routine analysis of all the data for:

• Safety and efficiency;
• Providing focused analysis of higher risk phases of flight;
• Mining for atypical potential precursors of incidents and accidents.

The Morning Report of Atypical Flights uses multivariate cluster-analysis to group flights by similarity along flight signatures derived from parameter values, calculates an atypicality score for each flight, and provides a plain-language description of what makes targeted flights atypical.

APMS was developed at National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Centre in 1993 and is implemented at US carriers participating in Space Act Agreements, and transferred to the FOQA (Flight Operations Quality Assurance) software vendor community.

Further Reading

• GAIN - Methods & Tools for Airline Flight Safety Analysis