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 ensure 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.

To do their job well, FAA inspectors 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 CSC team supports SPAS end to end, from requirements analysis to implementation and operations.

Information at your fingertips

For the FAA inspectors, the biggest advantage of SPAS is easy access to information that used to require painful digging and searching. 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.

Since its inception, SPAS has won 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.