Future Aviation Safety Team
Future Aviation Safety Team (FAST) is a multidisciplinary international group of aviation professionals that was established to identify possible future aviation safety hazards as undesirable consequences of changes. FAST performs analyses on ongoing or future changes affecting the global aviation system, aimed at revealing previously unidentified hazards. The FAST method is aimed to anticipate trends that may create an environment for the emergence of new safety hazards before they appear, and suggest mitigations for those hazards should they occur.
Area of Change List
FAST developed and maintains the ‘Areas of Change’ (AoC) list, presenting nearly 150 specific changes that could potentially influence aviation safety. In this context, changes must be understood as broadly as possible. An AoC is a description of the change, not an identification of the hazards that result from the change.
An analysis of the AoCs identified in 2004 demonstrates that changes catalogued many years ago, were directly evident in the majority of fatal aviation accidents over the past ten years. This ex-post-facto analysis of the AoCs identified in 2004 demonstrates that changes catalogued previously can provide an opportunity for predicting casual factors of future safety incidents.
The reports and presentations that resulted from this work can be found under Documentation.
The FAST method
The fundamental philosophy advocated by the FAST is the use of
- Areas of Change (or similar catalogues of emerging phenomena within a particular discipline in aviation) and
- An objective methodology to prioritize the AoCs and their associated hazards.
Such a method incorporating both subject matter assessments and quantitative data is one of the few practical ways to highlight the real, emerging issues that will face the aerospace industry in the future. Changes can introduce both safety risks (or issues) and/or risk controls because of planned, “piloted” changes such as SESAR/Next Gen by aviation stakeholders. Other, more-subjective means may not arrive at credible predictions for a variety of reasons, mostly because of personal predispositions, confirmation bias, recency effects and black swans(link naar wikipedia).
In 2004, Bob Kelly-Wickemeyer, Chief Engineer, Safety & Certification, Performance & Propulsion (Boeing retired) credited the FAST with originating the forensic-diagnostic-prognostic safety triad described above (Kelley-Wickemeyer, 2004). This paradigm has since been embraced by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, 2013).
Background
In 1999, the JSSI Steering Group established a dedicated working group to develop and implement methods and processes to support the systematic identification of future hazards. That group was called the Future Aviation Safety Team (FAST).
While the FAST is no longer operating under formal remit, NASA and NLR support continued prognostic safety analysis work by its former members. The current “ex officio” FAST core team includes ten aviation professionals with various backgrounds and expertise from Europe, the U.S. and Canada.