Metro Aviation’s flight data monitoring (FDM) and flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) program has experienced a 20 percent year-over-year decrease in flagged events in its first year, the company said. The program uses the Outerlink IRIS FDM. According to Metro, 100 percent of its helicopter fleet will be equipped with the IRIS system by year-end.
Since May 2017, Metro’s safety department reviewed more than 48,000 events, 14,000 of which were reviewed before official FAA program approval. These events are continuously monitored, scored, reviewed and updated to alert the operations, safety, and training departments to undesirable flight characteristics. Through the trending of the aggregate data, Metro’s safety department has been able to make recommendations and identify procedures that need additional training or guidance, and those recommendations have resulted in changes to Metro’s operations and training manuals.
The FDM systems are also used to validate or refute exceedances flagged by the aircraft and better understand the severity of an exceedance as opposed to data reported by the aircraft’s vehicle electronic monitoring display (VEMD). Cautions and alerts can be viewed in real time by Metro’s operational control center, allowing specialists there to offer assistance over the IRIS satellite communications system.
Metro operates a fleet of 140 aircraft for 35 mostly helicopter EMS customers nationwide.