Brings Afforable FOQA Reporting, Safety Improvements For GA

Systems developer Alakai Technologies and safety analyst CAPACG recently announced the Federal Aviation Administration has issued an amended Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) for installation of Alakai's wireless Broadband Units on Cirrus SR20 and SR22 aircraft. The certification allows Alakai's Broadband Units to be permanently installed on Cirrus aircraft, and to upload flight data and embedded Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) results via secure Internet connections at the conclusion of every flight.

"We are pleased to achieve FAA certification of Alakai's Broadband unit to enhance our Engine Trend Monitoring and Flight Data Monitoring products," said Brian Morrison, president of Alakai Technologies. "Users of our system now have access to near-real-time engine maintenance (MOQA) and flight (FOQA) evaluation reports as soon as they land, and can easily review safety reports, operational and logbook data, or replay their flight from any Mac or PC."

Alakai Technologies and CAPACG operate under a teaming agreement using the brand name GA-FDM.

"With the pending FAA requirements for Safety Management Systems (SMS), a solid FOQA program becomes an indispensable part of Risk Management and Safety Assurance at the core of every company's SMS", said Larry McCarroll, CEO of CAPACG. "Our mission is to provide the most cost-effective methods for implementing an SMS, allowing users to actively manage and mitigate risk and to become the best, safest pilots in the history of General Aviation. Now, with the approval of Broadband, objective data needed for SMS can be uploaded seamlessly at the end of every flight, with no action required by pilots or maintenance personnel. We are excited to be bringing this critical enabling safety technology to the GA community."

GA-FDM provides an automated web-centric system that uses embedded (real-time) expert analysis of engine operational and flight operational data to:

• Perform real-time engine trend and flight analysis to identify performance issues and reduce operating costs;
• Analyze maintenance and flight data, and summarize fleet (or virtual fleet) performance;
• Analyze reams of operational data from its relational database to identify risks and pre-cursors to accidents;
• Enable users to take preventive and corrective measures based on regular reports, event studies, mentoring, and proficiency training.

Real-time analysis performed during each flight produces reports that contain concise indicators of aircraft and pilot performance. Using the Broadband unit, these reports are emailed from the aircraft to the laptop or PDA of the pilot or maintenance personnel, and are uploaded to Alakai's relational MySQL database.

GA-FDM experts then use automatically generated web reports, analyses, and summaries of each flight to review engine trends, examine anomalies, replay flights, examine GoogleEarth trackfiles, and determine what advisories to provide to maintenance personnel, pilots and fleet operators. Users have already experienced significant operational savings, including reduced fuel consumption, increased maintenance intervals, and lower insurance costs, to name a few.

The GA-FDM system with Broadband link is available to Cirrus owners and operators for after-market installation.

FMI: www.ga-fdm.com, www.alakai1.com, www.capacg.com