APPLYING TECHNOLOGY TO FLIGHT RISK ASSESSMENT TOOLS Source-https://nbaa.org/ Editor, First Published July/August 2024 A flight risk assessment tool (FRAT) can be an extremely effective and powerful resource to improve pilot decision making and complement a flight operation’s safety management system, or SMS. Increasingly, business aircraft operators are turning to new technologies to move the FRAT beyond a simple checklist. “Risk management is essential to an effective safety program,” said Flying W Aviation, LLC Founder Jeff Wofford, CAM Fellow and former chair of the NBAA Safety Committee. “If a FRAT is too complicated, though, a pilot won’t use it. So, we must look at methods that are fair, effective and efficient.” FRATs come in many forms, including paper checklists that rely on the pilot to determine the level of risk for a given flight based on relatively easily defined metrics such as weather, fatigue and pilot experience. Answers may be ranked by number; the higher the final total, the “riskier” the flight. “We need to take this process more seriously,” Wofford added. “There have been a lot of accidents over the years in which the outcomes would’ve been a lot better had the pilots sat down and truly performed a flight risk assessment.” “I think of FRATs as a two-pronged tool,” said Robbie Moon, captain for a Fortune 100 company and member of the NBAA Domestic Operations Committee (DOC). “First, they’re a way for the company at large to ascertain risk at the tactical level and limit exposure to those risks. And they’re also a way to communicate those risks to other people within the organization.” More advanced examples include tablet and smartphone apps that follow the basic layout of paper FRATs, either as O p e n i n g L i n e s 7 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 05, ISSUE 07
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