Software makes flying safer

Airlines could be alerted to potential problems in aircraft before they can jeopardise safety on a future flight, thanks to a new computer program developed at Portsmouth University.

The program analyses data recorded in an aircraft’s black box after every flight and flags up abnormalities that fall outside the airline’s standard safety parameters.

It highlights even tiny aberrations in the flight data that would not usually be identified, allowing the airline to investigate and take remedial action if necessary before safety is compromised.

Currently, flight-data monitoring is a semi-automated process carried out on a flight-by-flight basis using a set of pre-defined safety criteria that check for known problems.

The new system works by comparing flights against each other and looks for similarities within apparently random sequences of data.

Those that are most similar are grouped together to identify recurring patterns and anomalies during a flight; these would previously have gone undetected.