China Eastern Airlines improves safety with GE’s algorithm

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).

• 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

• 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