FAA Creates Safety Training Animations 75% Faster with Collaboration Tools

Customer Profile

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C., has 45,000 employees and is the nation’s agency for ensuring the safety of United States air travelers.

Business Situation

The FAA wanted to improve its processes for creating safety training materials and speed production time for animated recreations of aviation events so they could be reviewed more quickly and efficiently.

Solution

With the support of Applied Knowledge Group, the FAA deployed Microsoft Office Groove 2007 to help teams produce animations efficiently. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is used to archive and share completed animations.

Benefits

• Faster creation and review of animations (75% time savings)
• Easier collaboration across time zones
• Lower project costs
• Better aviation safety training
• Productivity when on the road or offline

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is responsible for moving air traffic safely and efficiently in the United States. When an incident occurs on a runway, the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) division of the FAA recreates the event in digital animation format, using Macromedia Flash. Animations are set against the detailed runway map of the airport where the event occurred, and include the original control tower audio recordings of conversations between pilots and air-traffic controllers, synchronized with moving colored dots on the runway that indicate the paths traveled by the airplanes.

Each animation can take up to 12 weeks to produce because of the challenges of task coordination and information sharing among distributed teams. To work faster, the FAA employed Microsoft Office Groove 2007. Using Groove 2007, the FAA expects to reduce production time for each animation by up to nine weeks, enabling it to analyze events much faster and improve learning outcomes. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is being used to share animations with a wide audience within the aviation industry. 

Situation

Developing each animation was a lengthy process, requiring an Anchorage, Alaska–based team to collaborate extensively with other employees at FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C. To create an animation, an aviation event first has to be identified and nominated by one of the 10 services units of the ATO (for example, Safety, Communications, Terminal Services, or Flight Services). Each nomination is reviewed by the national runway safety program managers of each region of the FAA, and once an event is chosen, it is sponsored by the vice president of safety at the FAA. The nomination process alone requires extensive intraagency communication involving many different program managers and staff members.

Once an event is chosen, the animation team obtains the information it needs to produce the animation and then manages the review process for each iteration of the animation, until the piece is complete and approved. Without a central location for storing drafts, coordinating reviews, and gathering the input of team members, coordinating efforts across departments that are four time zones apart was a challenge. The animation team relied heavily on e-mail and phone calls to request data and information from various departments, such as control-tower audio recordings, draft reviews, comments, creative input, and more.

During the review process, sharing large Flash files in e-mail was often a problem because of e-mail server message size limitations. If a file was too large, it would bounce back to the sender, requiring the sender to post the file to a file transfer protocol (FTP) site, adding another time-consuming step to the process. Additionally, the four-hour time difference between Anchorage and FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C., made it difficult for teams to find times to schedule conference calls, further slowing the review process. The lengthy production process hampered the department’s ability to use the animations for educational purposes while the aviation events were still fresh in the minds of the involved parties.

In 2006, budget cuts reduced the Anchorage-based team from four people to one. Without a support staff to manage the animation development and review process, the remaining staff member needed to implement a cost-effective solution for coordinating production tasks.

Solution

In 2005, Air Traffic Event Forensics installed Office Groove 2007. Each participant was sent an e-mail invitation to join the Air Traffic Event Forensics Groove 2007–based workspace. After accepting the invitation, the workspace was automatically downloaded to the hard drive of each person’s computer, and all information in the workspace was synchronized among the computers.

One section of the Air Traffic Event Forensics Groove 2007 workspace stores all the data required to produce the animations, including control-tower audio recordings, runway maps, area maps, preliminary sketches of event timelines, and more, involved in recreating a safety incident. Following an aviation event, team members can post the requested materials directly to the shared workspace, without having to send large files in e-mail or upload them to FTP sites.

Other sections of the workspace are organized by aviation event. A row of tabs at the bottom of the workspace window provides access to materials that need to be reviewed and a link to a threaded discussion of the review. Tabs are named according to an FAA-assigned event tag that is generated for tracking purposes, followed by a number that indicates whether the animation is in the developmental or production stage. The first entry in each of these sections is a posting containing an executable Flash file that, when clicked, launches in a separate window, and plays an animation of an event. The post includes a request to the team to review the animation and provide feedback by posting comments to the thread. Subsequent entries contain the review comments of team members, postings of revised drafts, and further review commentaries.

Reviewers can instantly recognize postings they haven’t yet read, because Office Groove 2007 marks unread content with small red icons. This feature makes it easy for distributed teams to stay up-to-date on information in the workspace without reading through each posting to see what is new.

The right side of the workspace contains a chat window, used by team members to discuss issues and comment on the discussion thread in real time. The chat transcripts are also automatically saved, providing a historical record of the team’s conversations.

Once the animations are complete and approved, the final versions are transferred to a Microsoft Office SharePoint document library where they are archived for use at in-house training events, as downloads from FAA Web sites, or for burning to CDs to share from FAA booths at aviation safety trade shows or events. Storing the final animations on a SharePoint site also makes the training materials available to a wider audience of employees from many departments, without requiring that they maintain the Groove 2007 Air Traffic Event Forensics workspace on their computers.

For information on how AKG and Microsoft Technologies such as Groove and SharePoint can assist your organization, contact us.