“I wish I knew that before I flew!” If you hear this in your flight department, it signals a real opportunity to challenge your preflight briefings and explore more effective ways of preparing your crews for their flights.
The whole point of doing a preflight briefing is to address and mitigate issues and hazards before you fly. These assessments (generically referred to as FRATs) should inform you of what you need to know, not be a place to document what you already know.
Traditional risk assessment systems rely on a lot of manual research about today’s flight, weather, NOTAMS, runways, etc. Then that information is evaluated to ascertain the issues and risks. If pilots and dispatchers do not have the right experience, how can we expect them to correctly assess the risk for:
- an airfield they have never seen?
- a procedure they have never flown?
- conditions they have never experienced?
Simply having access to more information is not enough. Information can be overwhelming. It is unrealistic to expect crews to know – or remember – all of the applicable rules, procedures, regulations, handbooks, manuals, reports, brochures, bulletins, etc., relating to their flight. Given the unforgiving nature of aviation, forgetting one critical piece of information can have catastrophic consequences.
Polaris Aero’s VOCUS FlightRisk solves the problem of information overload by analyzing a variety of factors – pilot, environmental, aircraft, and airfield – to find the information that is most relevant to a flight. By providing context to information, we make it meaningful. This helps transform information into knowledge, which is the “know-how” for effective decision-making – and better decision-making means fewer incidents and accidents.
FlightRisk is also integrated to three (3) FlightPlanning systems (ARINC, Foreflight Dispatch, and APG iGenesys Preflight) and nine (9) Scheduling systems…making the automation a valuable asset to simplify your effort preparing for the next flight!
For more information about FlightRisk or any of VOCUS’s Safety Intelligence Platform products and services, visit https://polarisaero.com or contact sales@polarisaero.com
Steve Bruneau
Vice President, Aviation – Polaris Aero LLC
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