If you ran an airline, an air traffic control facility, or an airport, how would you assess the safety of your operations? From the perspective of each of these three management positions, the key questions are:

• Are we operating safely? (Are we operating efficiently?)
• Are our risks increasing or decreasing?
• Will proposed changes affect safety?

How would we know the answer to these questions? This is not simple - individual U.S. airlines have gone for periods of greater than fifteen years between fatal or hull-loss accidents. Were they any more or less at risk at any point between the accidents?

Similarly, many airports have never had a fatal accident in commercial operations. How would we know if our risks were changing? Would we be satisfied to know that we did not have an accident yesterday? Last year? Probably not - we know there are more close calls than accidents in any form of transportation - and yet, in the absence of a better measure, accident statistics remain the primary metric of the safety of our aviation system.

The premise of the ASMM project is that safety and risk within current operations can be known only to the extent that an industry can obtain and analyze relevant data reliably and continuously. We are developing the technology that will enable the industry to answer these questions.

Through groundbreaking research and development in the areas of flight data and related analyses, ASMM is helping to answer some of the questions above and is consequently making the National Airspace safer.