I believe NWA has a program where the FDR data is sent via acars to the union and any abnormal event or unstablized approach is automaitcally flagged. The crew of the flight also receives an email about it. Anyone have experience with that system?
Flight Operations Quality Assurance, or FOQA, is now in place at numerous carriers.
It is an excellent program and it pays for itself.
I interned in the flight safety department of Northwest Airlines and learned lots about the FOQA thing.
What you've typed is somewhat correct. What happens, is, a computer card in the FDR periodically gets pulled out by maintenance at about a dozen different stations and data from the past few weeks is downloaded and sent to the main FOQA computer system.
Line pilots that work in the FOQA department analyze this data, along with a FOQA analyst who is not a pilot. They can't look at every single individual flight but they scan the various categories of data for things that stick out. High descent rates at low altitude, idle thrust all the way to touchdown, flap overspeeds, greater than 250 below 10K, and so on.
Some of the things are the type where you don't need to find out who the crew is and contact them to learn more. It might be something that is not necessarily unsafe, yet a large number of similar occurrences indicate that things may be trending in the wrong direction.
Other instances do warrant a bit of detective work, such as an approach where the thrust is idle from 10,000 feet to touchdown, and the flaps are being retracted right at their speed limits, each increment at a time, all the way down to the landing flap setting being put in at 500' AGL and the wheels touching at REF+15 and max reverse.
In a case like that, one of the designated FOQA "gatekeepers" will contact the crew, often just the PIC. The gatekeepers are line pilots and they are the only ones that ever see the crew names rather than de-identified flight data. They are not punishing the crew nor do they have the authority to, but they will get in touch with someone who was in the cockpit and ask whatever they need to..."what the
hell were you guys doing two weeks ago landing at SFO like that???"
The FOQA office puts out newsletters a couple times a year, and you can also see some bulletins in the crewrooms featuring the latest concerns of the department. Top ten unstable approach airports to watch out for, a summary of an interesting event (de-identified), etc.
Like I mentioned, it pays for itself. They find engine data that they can take to the manufacturers and say, "look, we're being charged for this but we're consistently seeing this instead and here's the data to prove it." Northwest ended up saving a ton of money on something with the A-330 engines in the past few years with something like that, I forget the details.
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