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Introduction

In compliance with a directive in Section 132 of the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act of 2020,¹ the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tasked a study committee with identifying, categorizing, and analyzing emerging safety trends in air transportation, including offering advice to Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), industry, and others on options for improving means for identifying, monitoring, understanding, and addressing emerging aviation safety risks. Throughout its activities, the committee relies on a definition of “emerging” that refers to something “becoming apparent or prominent.” Thus, the committee interprets emerging trends in safety to include both new hazards emerging via proposals for new technologies or operations, as well as current concerns that may be becoming prominent. This report marks the second installment of a series of six reports to be issued within a span of 10 years.

The first report in this series was subtitled “Initial Assessment of Safety Data and Analysis Processes” and provided the committee’s initial review of the major processes for detecting emerging trends in aviation safety in place in the United States (NASEM, 2022). It covered the range of data sources and analysis processes currently used to identify aviation safety hazards, as well as approaches for assessing safety culture for a regulatory body such as FAA. Following the release of the report, the committee offered an updated

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¹ H.R.8408, 116th Cong. (2019–2020). Aircraft Certification Reform and Accountability Act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/8408.

Statement of Task (see Box 1-1) to reflect their findings and discussions from the first year of the study.

For the second phase of this study, the specific items of the Statement of Task that are covered in this report include:

1. The committee will assess whether available sources of information are being analyzed in ways that can help identify emerging safety risks as the aviation system evolves and whether other information should be collected and analyzed for this purpose.
2. The committee will draw on the results of FAA’s annual internal safety culture assessments and also will advise the agency on data and approaches for assessing safety culture to ensure that FAA is identifying emerging risks to commercial aviation and sharing that information throughout the agency and with the public.
3. The committee may employ a strategic foresight method, such as horizon scanning, to demonstrate alternative strategies for identifying emerging trends in aviation safety. While this exercise may reveal previously unidentified or overlooked hazards in commercial aviation, its primary aim will be to reveal whether such methods, including those that seek broad input from diverse parties, have the potential to be applied successfully for this purpose.

This report also addresses three conclusions named in the committee’s first report. First, in its first report the committee noted how FAA’s assessment of safety culture was, at the time of the first report, in a formative state requiring further development and review, which is followed up on in Chapter 4 of this report. Second, the committee noted several potential systemic stressors on commercial aviation safety, including increasingly complex systems, new entrants in aviation, new business models, and the introduction of new technologies and operations; these stressors are manifold in transformative changes to technology and operations examined in this report. Third, the committee noted that, while extensive data-gathering activities support monitoring of current concerns, gaps exist in data and analysis methods for predicting new hazards that may emerge with new technologies and operations; similarly, methods for predicting and then continuing to monitor for safety concerns are vital to the safe implementation of transformative changes to technology and operations.

This report frames its analysis using the established principles applied in aviation safety management. Safety management occurs across the entire lifecycle of technologies and concepts of operation, from their design through their implementation via production, operations, and maintenance. Such safety management spans multiple processes, as summarized in Table 1-1: (1) safety risk management processes before new technologies and

TABLE 1-1 Safety Management Components and Elements

NOTE: SMS = safety management system.

SOURCE: Adapted from ICAO, 2018, p. 9-2.

operations are implemented, to identify hazards, assess their risk, and implement appropriate safeguards and mitigations; (2) safety assurance processes once new technologies and operations are implemented via ongoing data collection and analysis to support continuous improvement; (3) safety policy and objectives determining the high-level properties of the organization integrating a commitment to safety; and (4) safety promotion across all levels of the organization.

FAA has two critical roles in this safety management. First, FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO) operates the National Airspace System (NAS), including providing air traffic control and traffic flow management functions. Second, FAA’s Office of Aviation Safety (AVS) is charged with ensuring aviation safety as the regulator that oversees safety risk management in a manner that does not unduly impede innovation and improvement in the industry and that is best positioned to convene industry-wide discussions of systemic issues.

Current mechanisms for safety management have evolved over decades to make commercial air transport the safest system ever. Many of these developments have been led by the commercial air transport industry within the United States and internationally, to the point of establishing formal standards for safety management systems for air carriers, venues for data

sharing and analysis, and an understanding of the fundamental attributes of safety culture. Other aviation sectors, such as regional airlines, helicopter operations, and general aviation are also increasingly adopting some aspects of safety management as appropriate to their specific attributes.

The first report identified a need for safety management for new entrants and for transformative changes to technologies and operations. “Transformative changes” are defined here as changes that are sufficiently novel that their impact on safety and risk cannot be extrapolated from current data and analysis methods. Such changes are highlighted in the potential systemic stressors noted in the first report with “new entrants” and “new technologies and operations.” These can include remotely operated drones and new classes of aircraft, including small air taxi aircraft and transformative changes to aircraft such as new propulsion systems and ultra-efficient configurations. The committee examined how hazards might emerge from introducing transformative changes, how they can be predicted before implementation and then detected and mitigated during operation, and how the newly introduced technologies and operations can enable indicators of safety and risk that were not previously available before.

Furthermore, these transformative changes are often proposed by “new entrants” (i.e., companies without experience in aviation). These new entrants cannot all be assumed to be ready or prepared to thoroughly apply all aspects of safety management, including appropriate organizational processes to create a pervasive safety culture and building-in the capability to collect the data needed to monitor for safety through the lifecycle.

These transformative changes thereby create both challenges and opportunities for aviation safety management:

• New technologies have the challenge of requiring new predictive processes for safety risk management, including both identifying new hazards that they may create and understanding how they may disrupt current mitigations to omnipresent hazards, particularly during certification. An example includes proposed aircraft that are automated sufficiently to change the pilot’s role to a higher-level of supervision carried out from a ground control station; methods of predicting and mitigating risks with the automated technology are still under debate, as is an understanding how the pilots’ contribution to safety may change when no longer on the aircraft.
• New operations likewise have the challenge of requiring new predictive processes for safety risk management, including both identifying new hazards that they may create and understanding how they may disrupt current mitigations to omnipresent hazards. An example includes proposals for flight profiles that, through advanced sensing and computation, can execute high-density air

traffic operations commensurate with urban air taxi operations; here, risks may arise both within the new operations and with others in the NAS acting under current operating rules.

• New technologies and operations could improve safety in a manner not accounted for in current standards. An example includes the technology to shift away from relying on “see and avoid” for conflict avoidance to sensor-based systems for “detect and avoid,” which may be more accurate in detecting and avoiding conflicts.
• New technologies and operations simultaneously have the challenge of requiring, and the opportunity to enable, new mechanisms for collecting and analyzing the data required to monitor and assure safety on an ongoing basis. An example includes, again, proposed automated aircraft. Current safety assurance assumes some degree of pilot detection and reporting of safety concerns that may no longer be possible for these aircraft, tempered by the potential capability for these automated systems to measure and capture new data streams not achievable with historic technologies.
• New entrants may have the challenge of coming from other industries and business models that do not have the organizational processes and culture needed for effective safety management at the levels demanded in aviation. Examples of different organization processes include those coming from other high technology industries that focus on moving to and through production quickly, without explicit organizational structures, policies and practices directed at safety.
• New entrants may represent the opportunity to implement the organizational structures, policies and practices that foster holistic safety management and the safety culture it requires. For example, expanded safety assurance processes may constantly highlight where and how new entrants need to improve their organizational processes and culture.

AVS’s role as a regulator requires careful examination of proposals for transformative changes for two reasons. First, AVS cannot directly evaluate every design decision, supervise every action on the production line, and monitor all aspects of every flight. Instead, its role is to ensure that the organizations themselves have the correct safety management processes and safety culture. Transformative changes require AVS to evaluate the efficacy of new processes for safety risk management and safety assurance even when they are not easily accommodated by AVS’s structure and extant regulations and guidance, and by current air traffic operations provided by ATO.

Second, AVS must consider the safety culture of the entities it oversees, including new entrants. This requires AVS to carefully consider their role

and methods for monitoring safety culture, including how an organization’s structure, policies and processes, and safety assurance methods, support continuous learning in support of safety. This also includes considering the culture appropriate for AVS to have within itself.

This report’s chapters detail each of the components of safety management relative to transformative changes in aviation technologies and operations, and relative to new entrants. Chapter 2 covers safety risk management (SRM) and addresses whether potential hazards with transformative technologies and operations can be identified and mitigated through existing FAA certifications and operational approval processes, and through current mechanisms for updating the general operating and flight rules that govern the NAS. Chapter 3 discusses safety assurance (SA) and addresses methods and data for identifying and mitigating emerging hazards during the operations of transformative technologies, including the collection and analysis of safety indicators that have not been available before. Chapter 4 provides a broad discussion on safety culture and its assessment, which includes addressing FAAs annual internal safety culture survey and how FAA can use safety indicators generated through SRM and SA to determine new entrant safety culture maturity and monitor for emerging organizational and cultural hazards. Chapter 5 bridges the prior chapters through the concept of integrated safety management that spans multiple organizations and that better integrates the stages comprising the lifecycle of new technologies and operations (from design and testing with commensurate safety risk management, through implementation and operation with commensurate safety assurance). Chapter 6 summarizes the findings of the report, highlighting recommended actions for FAA and for the industry.

REFERENCE

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