The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed the Global Aviation Information Network (GAIN) as a voluntary, privately owned and operated network of systems that collect and use aviation safety information about flight operations, air traffic control operations, and maintenance to improve aviation safety worldwide.
The necessity for better ways to improve safety is revealed by the worldwide aviation accident rate -- after enjoying a decline to a commendably low rate, it has been stubbornly constant for the last 10–15 years, and the aviation community must determine how to get off this "plateau." The desirability of using information more effectively to get off the plateau has been demonstrated by the successes over the years of the airlines that have been doing it, as well as the testimony that is so common in accident hearings, that "we all knew about that problem" -- revealing that problems were known but not acted upon. The capability to use information proactively to improve safety has been enhanced by technological advances that facilitate more effective collection and use of information about adverse trends. Experience has demonstrated that the systematic collection and sharing of aviation safety information can (a) facilitate the correction of troublesome trends before they cause accidents, and (b) result in significant immediate cost savings in operations and maintenance.
Because all accidents ultimately trace to human error somewhere in the accident chain, and because human error cannot be eliminated, the challenge in being proactive with information is how to use that information to make the aviation system less error prone and more error tolerant. This involves a major paradigm expansion, namely, moving beyond focusing primarily upon the operator -- e.g., with regulation, training, and punishment -- toward focusing more upon improving the system in which the operator is operating. This does not reduce the operator's safety accountability; to the contrary, it increases the safety accountability of all the others who design, build, and maintain the system.
Other transportation modes are also developing information collection and sharing programs in an effort to use information proactively. Outside of transportation, the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office (CIAO) was created in response to Presidential Decision Directive 63, which expressed concern in 1998 about the vulnerability of America's information infrastructures to hackers and terrorists, and CIAO is now developing ways to collect information about near breaches of infrastructure security in an effort to prevent actual breaches. Also, the Institute of Medicine issued a report in 1999 estimating that as many as 90,000 people die each year from medical errors, and it proposed the establishment of processes to collect and use information proactively help prevent such errors.
Experience is showing that processes for using information proactively to help avoid undesired outcomes can be very generic and broadly applicable to these and other industries. Accordingly, the GAIN program is working with these industries to exploit the many opportunities for sharing scarce resources to develop these generic processes.
