HeliOffshore, the association of offshore oil-and-gas helicopter operators, has started a groundbreaking data analysis program to help improve its performance in safety.
“One of the most powerful things we can do is show an operator its data against the rest of the industry’s data,” said Matthew Greaves, manager of HeliOffshore’s safety intelligence program (HSIP). Flight data monitoring makes it possible to notice a company has a particular ground speed on approach to rigs. HeliOffshore will not suggest it is dangerous or order a change. “We just say, ‘look at it, find why and think whether you are comfortable with that,’ ” Greaves explained.
Making such a comparison between an operator and the industry average involves sharing a large amount of data. “One of the first and most important things we had to concentrate on in this program was to set up the governance. . . . Everyone rightly wants it to be in place before they even consider sharing data,” said Greaves.
HeliOffshore’s governance process now dictates how a request for data gets approved, what will happen to the data once it is submitted and how results can be published. “If HeliOffshore did not exist, it is hard to imagine an environment where operators would feel safe to share information,” added Greaves, describing the effort as “a cultural change.”
How does HeliOffshore “mix” data from various sources and still guarantee a member its data will not be viewed by others? The association’s experts never present results that aggregate data from fewer than three operators. “If we had one operator in India for example, we would not present the country’s information but could aggregate data with other countries,” said Greaves.
Part of the endeavor lies in finding user-friendly ways to present information. “With scatter plots, distributions and histograms, we present the data in a way that makes it easier for people to interpret and bring their experience to,” Greaves said.
Sometimes the results may look very basic, but they are still extremely useful. HSIP was able to correlate a change in reported “Return to base” events with a change in flight hours, meaning that the rate was unchanged. “Without that underlying rate data, we would have been guessing about the cause,” noted Greaves.
More surprisingly, the offshore oil-and-gas helicopter community still does not have an accurate accident rate to rely on. “Accidents are known but the missing piece of the puzzle is flight hours,” he said. HeliOffshore officials hope to change that situation, as the reported data will include flight hours. The organization has agreements with 27 HeliOffshore member operators, representing “more than 80 percent of the aircraft in the members’ fleet.”
HSIP is also about measuring the safety picture before and after a specific change. After a new algorithm is introduced in the terrain avoidance system, “We can see the number of false alerts going down,” said Greaves.
The program can help understand what led to an area of unusually good performance. “If something was breaking on an aircraft type and a change of standard operating procedure at an operator seems to have improved things, it can be hard to find a correlation,” said Greaves. “We try to understand what they are doing differently, that way we can understand what is at the root of the results we are seeing.”
“The HSIP is still in its infancy, we only started working with the operators in February of this year,” he added. The advent of big data analytics does not mean the right tools are available off the shelf. “One of the challenges that some people miss is that traditional big data tools don’t always work well with time-series data, which of course is what flight data are. You have to choose your tools carefully to make sure you’re getting the most out of them,” he said.
What HeliOffshore will be doing in the next phase will thus involve an element of research. “We are hoping to start sharing larger data sets from a wider range of sources, and that is when we will really start to see the benefits,” Greaves explained. The association’s IT partners include Tonic Analytics and GE Flight Efficiency Services.
