Citation Jet Pilots Association (CJP) and CloudAhoy have entered into a partnership to bring a Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) programme to CJP's more than 1,400 members.

CJP-FOQA, powered by CloudAhoy's new P-FOQA product, combines CJP's dedication to flight safety with P-FOQA, a pilot-centric FOQA solution designed for general aviation. It is the fruit of three years of collaboration and driven by the combined visions of Charlie Precourt, CJP safety committee chair, and CloudAhoy to use data-driven analysis to improve flight safety.

“CJP's safety and education foundation has been striving to bring the tremendous success of airline FOQA to the single pilot in business aircraft, but we recognised the airlines' FOQA systems aggregate flight trends without focusing on individual pilot results,” Precourt explains. “Working with CloudAhoy, we have been able to create a programme that aggregates trend data like the airlines, but importantly adds a pilot-oriented feedback report immediately after each flight. This allows each pilot in CJP-FOQA to learn from the group trends while also tracking their own flight outcomes for continuous improvement and safety, a first of its kind capability in the FOQA world.”

With CJP-FOQA, pilots are provided with objective feedback immediately after every flight via email. This feedback includes how well pilots are performing on stabilised approaches, adhering to FARs and SOPs, and their overall safety performance, as well as links to a detailed debrief showing the pilot graphs, flight analysis and 3D visualisations, including HUD views. Members can also view a dashboard on CJP's website, which displays anonymised aggregated flight data across the organisation. This data can be used to focus and improve the simulator training that members receive, thus improving the training's relevance to their real world operations.

“CJP-FOQA is another industry-leading example of the CJP safety and education foundation's safety initiatives. We are pleased to partner with CloudAhoy and utilise the programme to increase the safety of the CJP members,” states CJP CEO Trent J. Corcia.

CJP is recognised for its dedication to flight safety. Its Safe to Land initiative resulted in new SOPs for stabilised approaches, landing parameters and go-around criteria. The Gold Standard Safety programme awards rigorous training and preparedness. In addition, there have been no accidents over the past two and a half years among member operators.

CloudAhoy brought P-FOQA to market to offer a cost-effective solution for general aviation and improve safety outcomes in the segment of the market with the highest accident rate. “FOQA technology had a phenomenal success in reducing airlines' accident and fatality rates,” confirms Chuck Shavit, founder and CEO of CloudAhoy. “But doing so in general aviation requires a radically different approach. General aviation FOQA must be pilot-centric, provide immediate feedback and be simple and accessible to non-experts. Our close collaboration with CJP over the past three years has been instrumental in creating P-FOQA, and we are proud to work with it.”

In general aviation, the high cost of entry, including retrofitting data acquisition hardware, has been a barrier to FOQA adoption. As inexpensive flight data acquisition devices such as AirSync and Textron's LinxUs FDM solutions come on the market, paired with the flight data analysis software from CloudAhoy, widespread FO(miQA adoption is now attainable.