Serious Incident  G-JZHL

2022-018: It is recommended that the UK Civil Aviation Authority, in conjunction with other regulatory authorities, develop a set of technical specifications and, subsequently, develop certification standards for an on-board system that will alert the crew of an aircraft to abnormally low acceleration during take-off.

The UK CAA recently presented our proposal to the EUROCAE Technical Advisory Committee on 16th January 2024 for the continuation of their previous Working group 94 discussing Take off performance Monitoring. There was positive feedback post the presentation which EASA was also present and endorsed our proposal.

Post this meeting, the EUROCAE council reviewed our proposal and agreed to the creation of WG-129 to look at Minimum operational Performance specifications (MOPS) or Minimum Aviation System Performance Specification (MASPS) for a “Take Off Performance Monitoring (TOPM) System”.

The UK CAA has been allocated a place at this working group and we will arrange a meeting with the programme manager to look at a road map prior to a kick off meeting.

As this EUROCAE working Group has been agreed and is in its infancy, the Civil Aviation Authority would like to propose that our next update to AAIB recommendation 2022-018 shall be provided by the end of February 2025.

Open - Tracked actions

28 February 2025

2022-019: It is recommended that the UK Civil Aviation Authority encourage all UK Air Operator Certificate holders to implement into their flight data monitoring programme algorithms to detect the precursors relevant to the monitoring of take-off performance detailed in the European Operators Flight Data Monitoring Document, Guidance for the implementation of flight data monitoring precursors.

In response to the recommendation from this serious incident the CAA will engage with stakeholders and regulatory bodies to identify parallel workstreams and seek to maximise the safety benefit of FDM programmes.

Following the introductory workshop in December 2022, the CAA hosted two further workshops relating to Take-Off Performance. The second of these, held on the 21st November 2023, specifically addressed the use of Flight Data Monitoring to assess take-Off Performance issues, including how to identify pre-cursor events.

The purpose of the workshop was to encourage the use of FDM for two purposes:
(1) To quantify, using historical data, the number of previously unknown take-off performance events that have occurred.
(2) To encourage operators to analyse new data for Take-Off Performance events.

The outcome from the workshop was that operators would analyse their historical data for low acceleration events. The CAA will investigate a method by which operators could pool take-off performance data, in order to quantify cross-industry low acceleration events. This data would be presented as a pool, categorised only by airport and runway. The concept is that each operator would only be able to see their data relative to an unidentifiable industry pool but would allow the CAA and operators to see cross-industry airport and runway hotspots (if they occur).

Although the document referenced in the AAIB recommendation (European Operators Flight Data Monitoring Document, Guidance for the implementation of flight data monitoring precursors) is a thorough and useful reference, there remains challenges to effectively measure some of the events or the associated risk exposure contained within the document recommendations. This document has been distributed to the larger airlines to encourage them to compare their current FDM events against those contained in the document. The smaller aircraft operators (corporate airlines) have also been engaged through the relevant liaison group.

The CAA will be restarting the cross-industry FDM forum in Q2/2024 which is expected to continue the work already conducted in the specific area of take off performance monitoring as part of a wider agenda.

Open - Tracked actions

28 February 2025