Serious Incident  G-JZHL

2022-018: It is recommended that the UK Civil Aviation Authority, in conjunction with other regulatory authorities, develop a set of technical specifications and, subsequently, develop certification standards for an on-board system that will alert the crew of an aircraft to abnormally low acceleration during take-off.

EASA have published their NPA 2025-01 (RMT.0741) which the whole of the EUROCAE / RTCA group were encouraged to read and comment back on before the deadline of 03rd October 2025.

The joint EUROCAE / RTCA working Group (WG129 SC244) continues to hold weekly working meetings and quarterly plenaries to progress the Take off Performance Awareness and Alerting System (TOPAAS) MOPS document we have started since the acceptance of our Internal report which confirmed the maturity of the current technology.

We have recently attended Plenary no 9 which also includes the 4 plenary meetings which we used for the production of the internal report for the TAC. During this last meeting the group agreed to an extension to the deliverable date as progress with the MOPS had not been as expedient as we had hoped. Our revised date which we are requesting of the TAC for publication of the MOPS is March 2027. With this timeframe, we continue to push for a mature draft document by September 2026.

Adequate – Open

October 2026

2022-019: It is recommended that the UK Civil Aviation Authority encourage all UK Air Operator Certificate holders to implement into their flight data monitoring programme algorithms to detect the precursors relevant to the monitoring of take-off performance detailed in the European Operators Flight Data Monitoring Document, Guidance for the implementation of flight data monitoring precursors.

In response to the recommendation from this serious incident the CAA will engage with stakeholders and regulatory bodies to identify parallel workstreams and seek to maximise the safety benefit of FDM programmes.

The CAA has continued to hold cross-industry FDM forums, with the most recent taking place in May 2024, where all operators were asked to capture performance data and identify any low acceleration events. During the forum, statistical analysis from one operator was shared to highlight the clear benefit and value in using FDM as a tool to identify low acceleration outliers.

Progress is being made to better understand these events and agree a common standard for data collection that can be rolled out to industry. Our Safety Intelligence team have thus far analysed 4 years’ worth of historical data which was sent to us from one operator and work is ongoing to determine the best point on the take-off roll to capture the acceleration.

The CAA continues to investigate a method by which operators could pool take-off performance data, in order to quantify cross-industry low acceleration events. As per our previous comments, this data would be presented as a pool, categorised only by airport and runway. The concept is that each operator would only be able to see their data relative to an unidentifiable industry pool but would allow the CAA and operators to see cross-industry airport and runway hotspots (if they occur).

The European Operators Flight Data Monitoring Document, Guidance for the implementation of flight data monitoring precursors was distributed to operators encouraging them to compare their current FDM events against those contained in the document. At present, the CAA has not received any feedback or comment from operators regarding this document.

The CAA intends to host another cross-industry FDM forum in Q2/2025. The aim is to provide an update on the progress made in the specific area of take-off performance monitoring and to continue the work already conducted.

The Civil Aviation Authority would like to propose that our next update to AAIB recommendation 2022-019 shall be provided by the end of February 2026. This will allow extra time for data collection to be progressed, both externally from industry and internally within the CAA, to identify common standards for data collection and a safe and secure system to receive such volumes of data.

Adequate – Open

October 2026