About the Global Safety Information Project

The Global Safety Information Project (GSIP) is a worldwide initiative led by Flight Safety Foundation that guides the aviation community’s response to challenges that may emerge from safety data collection and processing systems (SDCPS). Focus areas include safety data collection, safety data analysis, safety information protection, and safety information sharing. While GSIP initially concentrated on the Asia Pacific and Pan America regions, the project’s influence has steadily expanded to additional parts of the world.

GSIP To Date

Since the initiation of GSIP in 2015, Flight Safety Foundation has conducted over 25 focus group sessions, workshops, and conferences with global aviation stakeholders in 15 countries throughout Asia Pacific and Pan America. The Foundation also hosted a four-part GSIP webinar series.

In 2017, the Foundation published three SDCPS-focused toolkits, intended to help the global aviation community elevate its safety risk management capabilities and information sharing practices.

Detailed summaries of each year’s accomplishments, work products, findings and recommendations are provided in annual GSIP Reports.

Our Observations

Today, organizations cannot simply rely on reactive methods of safety risk management. Industry must take proactive and predictive approaches to address operational risk and drive the evolution of safety. Organizations learn about risk through numerous data sources, such as employee safety reports, flight data monitoring, audits, and various reports generated about operational conditions. Many of these data sources are not in the public arena, but instead are being collected, analyzed, and stored internally by organizations during routine operations. The Foundation believes that industry needs methods and mechanisms to share findings from these data. While there have been some advances in information sharing, most industry stakeholders keep their data and analyses private.

While the risk associated with aviation can be mitigated, it can never be eliminated completely. Through GSIP, the Foundation learned that the industry still has room to improve its understanding of risk. What is the quantified risk of midair collision in a specific region of the world? What is the quantified risk of turbulence that results in injury? Questions like these are difficult to answer today, but they are questions the industry needs to answer moving forward to make the safest mode of transportation even safer.

GSIP Moving Forward

In 2018 and beyond, Flight Safety Foundation will continue efforts to familiarize industry with the GSIP toolkits. We intend to collect feedback and best practices from early implementers and will incorporate lessons learned into future versions of the toolkits.

The Foundation is also engaged in efforts to develop a Safety Performance Monitoring Handbook, providing guidance and best practices for safety performance monitoring as detailed in ICAO Annex 19, Safety Management, and ICAO Doc 9859, Safety Management Manual.

Additionally, the Foundation also intends to develop a fourth GSIP toolkit that presents a strategic blueprint for global safety risk management based on emerging techniques and technologies.

Feedback on our work to date and our planned activities is welcomed and encouraged. Please contact Mark Millam, vice president, technical, with your comments.