Introduction to In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) for ANSPs and CAAs

ResilienX & NASA Co-presentation at Japan Drone Week - June 2022

In 2018, the National Academies published a paper titled: In-Time Aviation Safety Management: Challenges and Research for an Evolving Aviation System[1]. This paper presented the need to evolve traditional safety management systems (SMS) to meet the growing uncrewed aviation requirements. SMS systems have historically been utilized within airspace systems to investigate incidents, assess root causes, and identify mitigations, often resulting in changes to training, procedures, or requirements associated with an airspace, system, or component. This has created a successful flywheel of continuous safety improvement in aviation. With the increase in automation and new approaches to traffic management, the National Academies posited that the SMS loop could be accelerated to the point that it could be done “in-time” to prevent the original incident, rather than as a post-incident cycle that can often take years.

In 2019, The NASA System Wide Safety (SWS) group was tasked with investigating the concepts laid out by the National Academies. This spawned multiple research projects and resulted in academic papers and CONOPS being developed to address evolutions of SMS such as In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA)[2] and In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS)[3].

Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) and Civil Aviation Authorities (CAAs) around the globe are exploring integration of uncrewed aviation into their respective airspace systems. Many have begun to explore how traditional SMS system and practices need to evolve to account for the scale and automation of uncrewed aviation. The following educational video presents Dr. Kyle Ellis (Deputy Project Manager for the System-wide Safety Project at NASA Langley) and Andrew Carter (Chief Technology Officer at ResilienX) discussing the history and research on ISSA and IASMS concepts and their application in real-world environments today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZDc_XOgPC0#t=0m15s

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[1] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018. In-Time Aviation Safety Management: Challenges and Research for an Evolving Aviation System. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24962.

[2] National Aeronautics and Space Administration: In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) Concept of Operations and Design Considerations for Urban Air Mobility (UAM).

https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/ISSA.Conops.Final_.20.07.01.pdf

[3] National Aeronautics and Space A Concept of Operations (ConOps) of an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205003749