We're attending this week’s IATA Ground Handling Conference in Vancouver, and ended the first day with a 90-minute workshop on the trade group’s refinements to its Ground Damage Database.
“Airlines have collected data on accidents in many different buckets on their own,” said David Anderson, head of operational safety for British Airways and chairman of the GDDB. “It’s not a question of the quantity of the data, but the quality of the data.”
The GDDB was originally launched in 2011 to act as a better funnel for the reasons and causes for aircraft damage. IATA spent time that same year to make sure the data was reported consistently so that it could be used to better measure the progress made against what is largely costing the aviation industry some $4 billion annually.
“We need to be able to conduct statistical analysis on clean, defensible data,” said Nancy Rockburn, assistant director, operational data management for IATA and secretary of the GDDB. "Imagine the industry without aircraft damage. That's $4 billion that could be used to buy new planes and made other investments in the industry."
IATA started its new reporting protocols only since the first quarter of 2012 so the program is still very much in its infancy.
Now that the group has tackled the data quality issue Anderson mentioned, IATA now has to attract more members to buy into reporting the confidential data.
Rockburn said the GDDB currently includes reporting from 23 airlines and three ground service providers. While the locations of these firms are spread across the world, it’s a thin spread since it represents about 4.5 percent of the world’s flights. Only after more members take part can IATA draw any conclusions on the causes of aircraft damage.
And in some cases, some the refinements still haven’t kicked in either. For example, the GDDB includes three instances of damage to landing gear caused by pushback vehicles. However, from those three one was with a towbarless vehicle and other are “unknown.” IATA will also soon go to a new Web-based reporting tool with handy drop-down menus that should clear up many of these “unknown” instances with examples of real equipment.
