AC Air Canada

WASHINGTON—U.S. airlines and aviation regulators are poised to break new ground by expanding voluntary safety-reporting efforts to include data from Canadian carriers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

If the talks succeed, these people said, incident reports from Air Canada and two other large Canadian carriers would begin to be combined with extensive voluntary safety reports already being collected from U.S. pilots, cabin crews, air-traffic controllers, mechanics and other domestic sources.

No foreign data has ever been incorporated into the signature U.S. safety-data collection and analysis effort, which is known by the acronym Asias, for Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing system.

The goal, according to these people and other industry experts, is to reveal new air-safety threats or operational risks by assembling a more complete picture of incipient hazards and potentially dangerous trends spanning both sides of the border.

Launched in the late 1990s, such joint industry-government initiatives are the principal building blocks of record U.S. airline safety statistics that have avoided any passenger fatalities since early 2009. "That is an amazing accomplishment," Peggy Gilligan, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's top safety official, told a safety conference here Wednesday, adding that Asias is a big reason.

A final decision on Canadian involvement hasn't been made, and the initiative to incorporate data from Air Canada, along with carriers WestJet Airlines Ltd. and Jazz Aviation LP, still could falter. But active discussions among all sides are under way, according to several people familiar with the details, and within the past year Canadian regulators wrote a letter to the FAA supporting the concept. Prospective cross-border cooperation was a topic of public and private discussion during the pilot union-sponsored conference that ended Thursday.

After on-again, off-again talks during the past year or two, a Canadian agreement could come together as soon as several weeks from now, according to people involved in the process. Others predicted it's likely to take months.

One major issue still awaiting resolution, however, deals with legal protections for U.S. data under Canada's legal and regulatory systems. In the U.S. voluntary safety data is protected from disclosure to the press, can't be used as part of civil lawsuits and is kept even from federal safety inspectors who might use it in enforcement cases.

More than 40 U.S. airlines currently participate in the industrywide Asias program, along with more than two dozen corporate and fractional-jet operators. But proponents have long felt that incorporating data from the three big Canadian carriers—which would encompass some hub airports and busy North Atlantic routes—could broaden the program's scope and possibly reveal dangers or patterns that may have been missed or somehow overlooked. In the past, a few European carriers have tried to join Asias but ultimately failed to clear the logistical and legal hurdles.

There are roughly 70 million flight annually in U.S. airspace, a total that includes airlines, business aircraft and private planes. The comparable figure is about 12 million for Canada, which is responsible for providing safe navigation and various other services to pilots across the second-largest chunk of controller-supervised airspace in the world, after the U.S.

The same trend is evident in other parts of the world. European air-safety regulators and many of the airlines they oversee are moving to set up their own regional data-sharing program, patterned largely after Asias. Separately, Singapore government officials and the nonprofit advocacy group Flight Safety Foundation, in conjunction with Mitre Corp., a federally funded research organization, have taken steps to set up a data analysis program serving that part of the globe.

Asias started with just four U.S. carriers but expanded dramatically as airline officials recognized its value, and increasingly trusted the FAA and Mitre, the agency's contractor, to maintain the confidentiality of the information. It is now the world's largest repository of air-safety data.

Today, the Asias database includes detailed records of some 20 million flights across U.S. airspace; roughly 200,000 incident reports voluntarily submitted by pilots; and roughly 100,000 voluntary reports from traffic controllers. On average, pilots file about 4,300 fresh reports each month.

Analyzing such a high volume of information can pose challenges, including delays in uncovering underlying patterns. But the potential benefits are equally large, safety experts said, because the technique provides the best chance to identify needed safety enhances before accidents occur.

Corrections & Amplifications: U.S. airline safety statistics have avoided any passenger fatalities since early 2009. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated there haven't been any passenger fatalities since early 2008.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 25, 2016 17:35 ET (21:35 GMT)

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