According to global commercial aircraft accident statistics published by Airbus for 2002-2021, runway excursions ranked third among the most frequent fatal accident types (behind loss of control inflight and controlled flight into terrain) and accounted for 35 percent of hull losses. Working with their partners at GE Digital to sift through flight operational quality assurance (FOQA) data and finding runway excursions or near misses to be a significant issue for business aircraft as well, FlightSafety Executive Vice President of Safety and Regulatory Compliance Richard Meikle and his team rolled out a new runway excursion prevention program for all fixed-wing clients starting in February 2022.

“When we began working with GE Digital, we didn't know for certain runway excursions was where we wanted to focus,” said Meikle. “But not only was the data specifically highlighting runway excursions as the clear top safety threat, it told us exactly where the threat was highest. In some cases, such as Jackson Hole, WY, one in four landings triggered an alert in the data indicating it was at increased risk of an overrun.”

GE Digital and FlightSafety: a True Partnership

Launched in October 2021, the partnership between GE Digital and FlightSafety allows both entities to benefit from the other’s strength.

“GE Digital is honored to partner with FlightSafety to bring data-based training to corporate aviation,” said Andrew Coleman, General Manager of GE Digital’s Aviation Software business, in the 2021 press release. “By applying our flight data expertise and airspace efficiency software to FlightSafety training, we’re helping aviation professionals to identify the safest way in and out of any situation.”

The joint team meets weekly to discuss insights gathered from analysis of GE’s Corporate-FOQA database containing actual flight data—scrubbed of any aircraft, pilot, or operational identification—from more than 300 flight departments and over 1,200 aircraft. Data points include more than 2,000 measurements from engine, avionics, and airframe sensors; automatic processing of flight data populates a library of more than 200 events ranging from aircraft limitation exceedances to advanced risk-based modeling. FlightSafety’s goal is to use the C-FOQA data to determine the real-world scenarios that training can mitigate.

“Actual flight data will allow us to tailor training to address safety threats before crews even experience them,” said Brad Thress, FlightSafety President and CEO. “FlightSafety employs a risk-based approach to training, and partnering with GE Digital for its C-FOQA data will have incredible applications for us on approach stability, touchdown point control, procedure compliance, and runway safety, among other factors.”

Enhancing Training through Data Analysis

The joint GE Digital/FlightSafety team collaborate to focus on the events identified in the data. The GE Digital team pores over the data reports each week, classifying event severity from 1 to 3, with 3 being the most serious. GE provides the data analysis while FlightSafety leans on its more than 70 years of experience training business aircraft operators to identify the safety-related trends.

“No other training provider has the level of access to this volume of data,” said Meikle. “It gives us an insight into the entire industry that is using C-FOQA. Obviously, the C-FOQA data itself is incredibly powerful, but we have the ability to effect significant change using that data. We provide GE Digital with the ability to influence change, and they provide us with the focus to change the right things at the right time.”

After identifying runway excursions as its first focus, the team drilled further into the data to find the root causes, looking at the correlation between threshold crossing height/speed and touchdown point. For example, the team found pilots attempting to make smooth landings by floating down the runway eroded safety margins with little benefit. The team also determined the top 10 airports for runway-excursion risk based on the data, including seasonal fluctuations.

Armed with recommendations, data, and research, FlightSafety and GE Digital created a 15-minute debrief that has been shared with all FlightSafety fixed-wing pilots taking initial or recurrent courses starting in February 2022.

“It’s an anchor for every course and a consistent message that triggers the discussion,” said Meikle. “There have been at least 35 runway excursion events just this year to date [through March 2022] in multi-engine turbine airplanes around the world. If we can reduce the runway excursion risk through focused training and educate crew members on the techniques to prevent the runway excursion, then we can have a dramatic impact on safety. It saves lives, it saves airplanes, and it reduces the loss payouts by insurance carriers. It's better for the industry all around.”

Meikle said the focus area will change every seven months to capture the entire semi-annual training population, with pilots who have already heard the discussion able to skip it or choose a new topic. An example future focus topic may be preventing altitude restriction excursions at airports such as Van Nuys, CA and Teterboro, NJ requiring low-altitude level offs due to traffic passing overhead inbound to other airports.

“At some of these airports, ATC wants you to climb and then level off very quickly—maybe as low as 1,500 feet AGL—to avoid traffic coming over the top,” Meikle said. “The data will tell us how pilots are setting up their avionics and what we need to teach them to reduce confusion in the cockpit so they execute the departure with precision.”

Building Specialty Procedures

Extending its goal to reduce runway excursions in the real world, FlightSafety is also working with GE Digital to build RNAV visual flight procedures (RVFP) for specific airports or runways that don’t have instrument procedures. The RVFPs can be loaded into the aircraft’s flight management system to provide a lateral and vertical path to the runway using a set of waypoints and altitudes.

“If you deliver the airplane to the runway in a stable fashion, your risk of a runway excursion is reduced dramatically,” said Meikle. “We are already engaged with GE Digital experts in the construction of three RVFPs with the goal of building at least two per year.”

Meikle said FlightSafety is targeting airports that show high runway excursion or unstable approach risks, such as Sedona, Arizona, where pilots can lose sight of the runway due to terrain near runway 21, and others where airspace constraints influence arrival paths such as New Jersey’s Teterboro, where the crew of a Learjet 35A stalled the aircraft during an unstable circle to land approach to a runway without an ILS in 2017.

“They were not on any defined procedure and got very close to the runway before they started the circling maneuver,” Meikle said. “An RVFP could prevent this kind of tragedy, allowing you to line up on centerline at the right altitude, on the right approach angle, nice and stable, essentially normalizing what is otherwise a challenging maneuver.”

Being Prepared Means More than Just Being Proficient

FlightSafety’s partnership with GE Digital provides focus in targeting specific safety threats identified in the industry through real-world data, and then development and deployment of targeted procedures to reduce that risk.

“We have a long-term relationship with GE Digital,” Meikle said. “And our plan is to continuously evolve training, because training should be more than a regulatory event. It's not a regulatory event in our minds. It's a safety event. It happens to satisfy the regulatory requirements in the process. It gets you prepared instead of just being proficient.”

Partnering with GE Digital using C-FOQA data to drive training innovation is the next step in FlightSafety’s continuous drive to produce the most prepared pilots in the industry.

Learn more about FlightSafety's partnership with GE