Flight Test Safety Database Available

NASA and the FAA have created a Web-based database to serve as the aviation community's one-stop reference guide for flight test safety. NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance initially funded the effort as a research initiative but was quickly joined by the FAA, which had started its own comparable effort. NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, CA, had initiated discussion within the flight test safety community on ways to meet mutual needs for easy access to test hazards and mitigation techniques associated with flight test disciplines applicable to both commercial and government research and development testing. Phase One of the effort was to develop FAA aircraft certification flight test safety data covering flight test requirements along with their associated hazards, identified risk levels, and mitigating procedures. That data is now available in the portal. The database integrates standard flight test safety practices used by industry and the government in a user-friendly format, allowing both civilian and government organizations easy access to valuable safety information. It will eventually serve as a forum for sharing valuable lessons learned from flight tests, although specific references to such events will not be part of the database, which is non-regulatory in nature and in the public domain. The portal interface allows a user the ability to search the data by various parameters as well as by keywords, resulting in a list of selected records. The user can then choose to print or save these records individually or in a combined format for further manipulation. The new flight test safety database Web portal, which went on-line in mid-April, can be accessed at http://pbma.nasa.gov/ftsdb/Home.aspx