CSC Gives FAA Safety Inspectors Access to Critical Data

The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) 3,500 Flight Standards Aviation Safety Inspectors work from 110 locations in the United States, Europe and the Far East to monitor the performance of aviation entities to ensure everything surrounding the operation of a flight is working properly, and the safety standards set by the FAA are being followed.

FAA inspectors can often be seen overseeing flight operations from the cockpit. But behind the scenes, their work involves everything from spot checks at airports and aircraft repair stations to regular aircraft inspections to monitor safety standards, maintenance and compliance with FAA regulations.

With nearly 700 major domestic and foreign carriers and more than 6,000 other small planes involved in everything from mail delivery to crop spraying, the work of the inspectors is not easy. To do their job well, they need timely access to 38 different data sources, including past inspection and maintenance records, comprehensive data on accidents and information about hundreds of engines and aircraft models.

SPAS: data made easy

Since 1997, CSC has provided full life-cycle support for the FAA Safety Performance Analysis System (SPAS), an automated information system that simplifies the task of the safety inspectors by integrating and analyzing safety data from numerous aviation-related government and commercial databases. Working closely with government personnel at the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center’s Aviation Safety Division in Cambridge, Mass., the small CSC team supports SPAS end to end, from requirements analysis to implementation and operations.

"The main selling point of SPAS, the goal it serves the FAA, is improved safety. By providing the inspectors quick, one-stop access to safety data, SPAS enables them to focus their attention on critical areas of aviation safety," explains CSC’s Bob Doutch, a requirements analyst on the project. "It does this not only by automating a lot of routine tasks but more importantly, by ensuring that the data is both more comprehensive and of higher quality than the data they could access previously."

"SPAS was FAA’s first major Web technology application," adds CSC’s Philip Howells, who does "a little bit of everything" for SPAS (his areas of expertise include software development, maintenance and operations). "Because it’s on the FAA wide area network, safety inspectors can access the system from anywhere their work takes them. And because it’s a data-driven system, SPAS is in a constant state of evolutionary development—we continually add new functions and new data and technology to upgrade the system."

Information at your fingertips

For the inspectors, the biggest advantage of SPAS is easy access to information that used to require painful digging and searching. "We’ve put information at their fingertips," says Doutch. By integrating disparate data, by analyzing it systematically, by flagging areas of interest through the application of trend analysis as well as traditional Web-based query and browsing capabilities and, above all, by providing easy cross-referencing to different data sources, SPAS enables safety inspectors to often accomplish in 15 or 20 minutes what used to take them two weeks of exhaustive effort to complete.

Currently, SPAS is oriented toward a large display wired connection, which means that while FAA inspectors can get to the system from, say, a laptop in a hotel room, they cannot access it from the tarmac or the cockpit—places where their inspection routinely takes them. One important goal, therefore, is to upgrade SPAS to remote computing technology, so inspectors can quickly access the system from a small handheld device.

Doing things right

CSC team leaders are also involved in getting Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, with two team members (including Doutch and Howells) already certified. The coveted certification from the world-renowned Project Management Institute will further strengthen the high standards of excellence demonstrated by the team on this project.

Meanwhile, SPAS continues to win accolades. The project was publicly cited by the FAA Administrator as an example of how government "can do things right"—a rare endorsement of the system’s performance and the joint Volpe Center-CSC team’s successful partnership with the FAA.

Learn about CSC's long history of support to the FAA.

Find more about CSC's partnership with the U.S. government.

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