Oil-and-gas service company PHI has selected Sagem’s AGS flight operations monitoring system for its helicopter fleet. AGS is a ground-based solution that reads and analyzes flight data from aircraft. PHI will be using it as part of its line activity monitoring program (Lamp). AGS can be used for any flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) data applications, processing and analysis from aircraft recorders, according to Sagem. It produces user-configurable, customized reports, offers fast data processing, typically less than one second per flight hour, and can be used with multiple recorder types.
“We have integrated almost all of the commercially available recorders in our ground software and continue to integrate new recorders as they enter use by our clients,” said Geoff Hanshaw, Sagem’s sales director. “Typical recorders are from Sagem, Teledyne, L3, Avionica, North Flight Data Systems and Penny & Giles.”
“The AGS will streamline our FDM [flight data management] program and greatly increase our efficiency. This, in turn, will allow us to provide more safety benefit and increase added value to our crews and customers,” said Jared Simon, PHI’s Lamp manager.
Hanshaw said clients can customize reports in whatever format they choose such as HTML, CSV, Excel and PDF as well as create individualized templates with company colors, logo, graphs and charts “all through a drag-and-drop interface.”
Information also can be reported by flight origin and destination, Hanshaw said. “We have integrated the Gulf of Mexico oil rig platforms in our database. These are automatically detected as part of the AGS analysis process. This feature allows the user to organize results by landing or takeoff platform.”
Hanshaw said the system has “higher replay ability” because it can reprocess data to either rerun the same procedures/algorithms or new procedures/algorithms without losing any previous work that has been performed during the first processing of the data. This saves the user time by avoiding duplicating previous efforts.”
AGS has various engineering features built into the system that benefit pilot and mechanic alike, Hanshaw said. “The data recorded on each aircraft is slightly different, but normally includes engine and other line-replaceable units, which can be viewed along with any other recorded parameter. This feature allows the user to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of a failure or maintenance issue. Once the root cause is found, through a simple interface, the user can create a procedure to identify any other aircraft with the same symptom either through the replay feature of the AGS or any future aircraft system through normal analysis of the AGS. This utility goes beyond theory,” Hanshaw said. “One of our users’ helicopters reported an uncommanded yaw while sitting on a platform. The AGS was used to identify which equipment failed, saving the mechanic time in troubleshooting the aircraft and clearing the pilot of any wrongdoing.”
