AIRS: Accident/Incident Reporting System for the US Hang Gliding & Paragliding Assn.

Designed and managed development/deployment of a system for reporting accidents and incidents that occur at US hang gliding and paragliding sites. A specific constraint was restricting all participants’ identities through an NIH Certificate of Confidentiality protecting participants in research using human subjects.

The US Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association (USHPA) oversees all foot-launched free flight activities in the United States. One aspect of their mission is improving pilot safety, and another is protecting and preserving flying sites. An interesting aspect of collecting information about all accidents and incidents that occur in the sport is that the information all becomes available through disclosure if a lawsuit is filed – unless the information is either protected by attorney-client privilege, or protected by a Certificate of Confidentiality (CoC). The challenge with the former is that information available for learning by the pilot community is restricted. The challenge with the latter is all of the constraints and protections required by the CoC. The USHPA Accident Reporting Committee chose to pursue a CoC, with the help of one of its Directors, who also happened to be involved in human subject research in his profession.

The project work included learning about the constraints and parameters required by the CoC, designing the system to encourage members to report all incidents and accidents (with as little or as much information as they chose), communicating the benefits of the new system, and working with a contract development company to build the system (using both on-shore and off-shore resources). The system was built in Ruby on Rails with a Postgres database. The personally identifiable information (PII) had to be stored in a separate, encrypted table, that is only accessible by project team members with an assigned private key. The CoC guidelines are all written assuming physical storage of PII, so we had to invent an appropriate system to meet the requirements and also educate the Institutional Review Board (IRB) about the new technology.

The system has passed two annual reviews with the IRB and holds information about over 500 accidents and incidents. The Accident Reporting Committee has been able to produce multiple articles offering “lessons learned” guidance to USHPA members. Analysis is underway to produce the first large-scale report on the data.

Company: US Hang Gliding & Paragliding Association
Position: Program Manager
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, NIH Certificate of Confidentiality

References:
https://airs.ushpa.aero
Article introducing AIRS