2024 FAA Safety Data Challenge Announcement.pdf

2024 FAA Aviation Safety Transformation Challenge

About the Challenge

Data is crucial to identifying emerging safety trends and mitigating risks, allowing us to move toward a more predictive environment.

The 2024 FAA Aviation Safety Transformation Challenge will ask participants to use modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities available to them to identify to the FAA underlying causal factors for safety events in the National Airspace System (NAS), ultimately improving aviation safety.

This Challenge is designed to allow participants to explore existing data to identify insights and develop a set of recommendations. Participants will submit safety solutions using data analytics and AI.

The FAA intends to identify the most promising submissions for further exploration to help us develop a more predictive safety culture through the issuance of Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs). This is an opportunity for data to play a more active role in mitigating risks in our system.

Background

The FAA envisions new safety analytics capabilities and services that will vastly expand and accelerate insights from current and additional sources of data and provide a comprehensive understanding of causal factors of safety events to help predict high-risk operations and environments. The focus is on commercially available capabilities and analytics tools to make similar improvements to the safety of operations.

The FAA aims to:

• Employ predictive analytics capabilities to identify and mitigate potential safety risks proactively.

• Leverage AI and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of safety data and derive actionable insights.

• Integrate various data sources to provide a comprehensive view of aviation safety factors.

• Improve the overall safety of the NAS through advanced analytics and rapid response to identified risks.

The Challenge

Overview Participants will submit technical papers outlining causal, aggravating, and mitigating factors, leading indicators and potential solutions to aviation-related challenges using enhanced data analytics methods.

Challenge participants will be asked to address the issues listed below. Participants can also utilize data to present novel issues that are not listed.

• Surface Incursions and Excursions

• Airborne Encounters

• Voice Data Exploration

• Technical Operation Equipment Outages

• Smoke, Fume and Flame Issues

• Runway Excursions / Landing Gear Issues

• Turbulence

• Go-Arounds

The Data To support the Challenge participants, the FAA will provide access to selected data sets, some of which will be subject to non-disclosure and other restrictions and requirements before access is provided. Failure to agree to those restrictions and requirements will prevent the Challenge participant from participating in the Challenge. It is expected that industry will be able to enhance the analysis by adding other data sets to those released by the FAA.

The Results Challenge participants will be asked to submit a technical paper that describes their findings and recommendations. It will be essential to include details around how the analysis was conducted, the data used, and the findings and recommendations from the analysis. The most promising participants may be invited to a challenge finale event to present results and demonstrate how they came to their conclusions.

Participant Announcement Participants selected to participate in the challenge will be announced in the coming weeks with more information specific to the conduct of the challenge to follow.