Analysis of flight data has long been a focus in aviation research, and has been implemented in some form by many commercial vendors. However, existing methods, which focus on pre-defined exceedances, are really only the first steps.

Exceedance analysis requires highly sophisticated data collection but provides very modest analysis, examining only a portion of the data. It scans to extract and understand a small number of pre-defined events.

In order to enable FOQA analysts advanced APMS tools look beyond events within individual flights to identify systemic problems through statistical analyses of many flights. APMS development of advanced tools thus has three major thrusts:

• moving beyond exceedance-detection to routine analysis of all of the data for safety and efficiency
• providing focused analysis of higher risk phases of flight
• mining for atypical, potential precursors of incidents and accidents.