Baldwin Safety & Compliance has become the first accepted vendor for the rotorcraft community within the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (R-ASIAS) programme. The platform for the rotorcraft community was developed by General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) for the FAA.

ASIAS was initially introduced to the airline industry in 2007 with a mission to proactively discover safety concerns before accidents or incidents occur, leading to mitigation and prevention. Baldwin was one of the first to share relevant safety information with ASIAS in a similar agreement for the fixed wing business aircraft community in 2016. GDIT has now developed the centralised data repository and operational infrastructure to securely share de-identified rotorcraft data within the rotor community, hence R-ASIAS.

President Don Baldwin says: “We have been working with ASIAS for our fixed wing clients for many years. I have always been a believer in the value of de-identified data-sharing, and the best platform to accomplish this today is ASIAS. Rotorcraft's different missions and procedures require a unique system so there has been a push from the industry to create this R-ASIAS for quite some time. Our client, Global Medical Response (GMR), has been one of many operators pushing for this rotor specific platform and we are excited to work with it as well as other rotor wing clients that are anxious to participate in this highly sought after data-share initiative.”

The data sharing agreement with GDIT will allow Baldwin to automatically feed data to R-ASIAS on behalf of its rotorcraft clients. Baldwin clients will simply identify which reports they want to share in the R-ASIAS portal. Baldwin will also have the authorisation to study, compare and analyse specific de-identified aggregated safety information on behalf of the rotorcraft client and provide consults as requested.

Sean Mulholland, director of safety at Air Evac Lifeteam and SevenBar Aviation, both GMR companies, says: “The R-ASIAS is quite an accomplishment for the rotor community and will benefit large operations like ours as well as smaller operations that don't have the bandwidth and access to analysts to do this type of work. Having Baldwin serve as the third party transfer organisation is huge for us in terms of efficiency. It is an expert in this space and all we need to do is determine what data we want to send. Now it is up to the rotor community to share their data.”