Introduction
Company
China Eastern Airlines
Industry
Aviation
Products
Safety Insight
Product Categories
Flight Analytics for Airlines
Challenge
China Eastern is a leading Chinese full service carrier with young aircraft fleet (< 6 yrs), mixed (Airbus, Boeing), and growing rapidly. Their Safety / FOQA / flight data management team was constrained with managing an expanding fleet with limited resources.
China Eastern was seeing 4 safety related events on B737-800 aircraft from more than 3 MM flights across 4 years and an inability to apply B737-800 safety experiences to accurately assess tail strike risk to safety on A320 fleet (largest proportion of fleet).
Solution
- More accurate method for assessing tail strike risk by calculating tail clearance using trigonometry instead of measuring pitch angle, which is susceptible to measurement inaccuracy of landing gear position
- Application of above algorithm to 26 parameters from 560,000+ flight hours of customer data in EMS to create historical risk score
- Online tool with safety risk score to enable safety analysts to diagnose root cause of each flight’s risk and recommend actions
This algorithm helped China Eastern assess safety risk from aircraft tail strikes. It enabled safety analysts to accurately diagnose events and advise actions.
Results
- 0 safety related events on A320 fleet since adoption of GE solution*
- Operational reference and data to systematize process for preventing safety related events in future
- Actionable benchmark for pitch angle, pitch rate and pitch command based on anonymized data from other global flights from EMS record of 409 MM flight hours
*As of April 2019
