A Broad-Based Accident Prevention Program
ASA, in cooperation
with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), is developing an automated
system that could better prevent commercial aviation accidents. It could
also provide technology transfer of prototype products to commercial vendors
using present safety programs and technology.
The Aviation Performance Measuring System, being developed at NASA's Ames Research Center, reduces the human labor needed to process large quantities of troubleshooting performance data used in today's aircraft systems. This makes the processing of the data more efficient and enhances the data collection and cost-effectiveness of present safety programs of U.S. carriers.
The system monitors more than 1,200 aircraft operational functions, providing valuable early warnings of potential problems involving performance, cockpit instrument inputs, electrical equipment, fuel and hydraulics. Funded by the FAA, the $3 million research program began in 1993 as a collaborative effort between NASA and the FAA to develop a set of tools that would allow large quantities of flight data to be processed in a highly automated fashion.
Operational testing of the system is being done by personnel of Alaska Airlines, who are analyzing data from their first six MD-80 aircraft equipped with Quick Access Recorders. A process of developing future system upgrades will be ongoing as the employees of Alaska Airlines become familiar with the system's capabilities and have time to identify new requirements.
The system provides a prototype of a flight data analysis ground station with customized, broad-based reporting capabilities for the U.S. airline industry. Technology transfer and commercialization opportunities are built in using present safety programs and technology.
Under NASA's new Aviation Safety Program, the system eventually will service airline engineering, maintenance and training functions, as well as commuter, cargo and corporate air carrier needs. The entire aviation system could benefit from the program in monitoring regulations or operating practices needing improvement. The FAA's funding of this research and development is an effort to expand industry capability by making the best use of digital flight data on a routine basis.
This initiative supports a National Civil Aviation Review Commission preliminary report, presented recently to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater. The report contained recommendations on how best to finance, manage and improve the performance of the nation's civil aviation programs.
Flight operations safety programs using flight-recorded data have been providing critical safety information to non-U.S. airlines for more than two decades. In cooperation with an FAA-sponsored study, four U.S. airlines initiated trial programs in 1995 that resulted in the need to improve existing off-the-shelf software to enhance the effectiveness of current safety programs of large U.S. airlines.
For more information, contact Dr. Kevin Corker at Ames Research Center.
Call (650) 604-0055, Fax: (650) 604-2698, E-mail: corker@mail.arc.nasa.gov
Or contact Dr. Irv Statler at Ames. Call (650) 604-6655, Fax: (650)
604-2698, E-mail: statler@mail.arc.nasa.gov
Please mention you read about it in Innovation.
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Close-up on Solar Conditions
The TRACE mission joins a fleet of spacecraft studying the Sun during a critical period when solar activity is beginning its rise to a peak early in the new millennium. The Sun goes through an 11-year cycle from a period of numerous intense storms and sunspots to a period of relative calm. The coming months in the Sun's cycle will provide solar scientists with periods of strong solar activity interspersed with periods when the Sun is relatively passive and quiet. This will give TRACE the chance to study the full range of solar conditions, even in its relatively short planned lifetime. The TRACE telescope is really four telescopes in one. It allows light reflection and analysis, collecting images over nearly 25 percent of the Sun's disk with a powerful, flexible data handling computer that allows adaptive target selection, data compression and image stabilization. The power of the TRACE telescope to perform detailed studies of the solar atmosphere makes this observatory unique among the current group of spacecraft studying the Sun. "The spacecraft has roughly ten times the temporal resolution and five times the spatial resolution of previously launched solar spacecraft. We can expect to resolve some present mysteries of the Sun's atmospheric dynamics as well as discover new and exciting phenomena," said Dr. Alan Title, TRACE principal investigator from the Stanford Lockheed Institute for Scientific Research in Palo Alto, California. The TRACE telescope was designed and developed in cooperation between Lockheed Martin Corporation and Stanford University, with additional design and testing at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. For more information,
contact Gerry Daelemans at Goddard Space Flight Center. Call (301)
286-2193, Fax: (301) 286-1694, E-mail: gdaelema@pop700.gsfc.nasa.gov
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ASA's
Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) mission launched
at the end of March will affect power and communications systems
on Earth by greatly improving our understanding of events in the
Sun's atmosphere. It is the first space science mission with an
open data policy that will be available to other scientists, students
and the general public shortly after the information becomes available
to the primary science team. 
