Empowering Pilots: Denise Dekker on the Unseen Impact of Flight Data

Air travel is largely an effortless experience for passengers. They book a flight, sit back, and wait to arrive at their destination, preferably with a snack and in-flight entertainment to pass the time.

But behind every flight is a complex network of decisions and data points. These range from software that gives pilots actionable insights into the safety and fuel efficiency of recent flight paths to innovative engine maintenance programs that help reduce fuel consumption and emissions.

Through powerful flight data analytics platforms such as Safety Insight and Fuel Insight, GE Aerospace is working to break each flight down into a series of patterns and actions that can be improved upon to help make flight safer and reduce emissions.

"We're really embedded in the aviation industry alongside our customers," says Denise Dekker, solutions architect at GE Aerospace and a longtime pilot. "Before I started working on software like Safety Insight, I just knew GE Aerospace for their engines - I had no idea the company was doing so much more."

For Dekker, aviation safety is more than a statistic. At age 6, she lost her close friend in a tragic flight accident, the same summer that her family relocated so she could attend the same school as her friend.

With a pilot father who flew long-haul for KLM every week, this experience was even more acute.

"Each time he'd walk out the door, suitcase in hand, I'd feel an uneasy knot in my stomach," she explains. "He took that as a teaching moment. He would sit me down and explain that everything comes with risk, even sitting at home, and talk me through why and how accidents can happen and how we can use those learnings to make flying safer in the future."

Dekker during her childhood. Images courtesy of Denise Dekker.

That lesson paid off: Little more than a decade later, Dekker would find herself in the cockpit of a Cessna 152 trainer plane, control columns in hand, putting her fear behind her. Taking to the skies, she was quickly hooked.

"When we landed, the instructor told my father to brace himself, as things were about to get very expensive for him!" she laughs.

Using the Swiss Cheese Model to Improve Safety

In movies, aviation safety is simply when investigators start digging into black box data to figure out what went wrong. But for the aviation industry, it's a consideration for every single flight that takes to the skies.

In 2023, GE Aerospace recorded zero engine-related events, improving on a strong five-year record of 0.04 incidents per one million departures. That is no mean feat, given that an aircraft with an engine manufactured by GE Aerospace or one of its partners takes off every two seconds.

"Air travel and cheese may seem like an unlikely pair, but we often talk about the Swiss cheese model to understand how incidents can occur," explains Dekker. "Each slice of cheese can be seen as a different aspect of our operations - like maintenance, air traffic control, or pilot training. Usually, the holes (or errors) in these slices don't line up. But when they do, like looking through a stack of Swiss cheese slices, it can lead to a chain of events that may compromise safety."

To increase awareness about potential incidents, pilots need information on fuel usage, routing, and risks encountered on previous flights. Using software such as FlightPulse, pilots can compare flight data from previous journeys with the performance of their current flight. This data-driven approach allows pilots to identify potential risks and trends, enabling proactive risk management before issues arise.

In Dekker's words, "instead of just learning from incidents, we want to learn from flights that had potential risks and from flights that were standard. This way, we can learn from more data and not only understand what went wrong but also learn from what went well."

By monitoring each flight, pilots can spot whether any new trends emerge and where there may be a higher risk of an incident. This same data can be used to make flying more efficient, by leveraging personalized data relating to fuel consumption, weather patterns, and flight routes or altitudes to decrease the emissions impact of each journey. Adding up the data from thousands of pilots, all of this results in a continuous feedback loop between flight data and flight performance, which improves safety and sustainability, day by day.

Making Flying Safer with Each Flight

Today, Dekker is a long way from the child who worried each time her father left home. Her career has been forged on making aviation safer and more sustainable, from her earliest roles as an incident investigator to her work with customers like KLM to translate their needs into engineering solutions. The recent SkyTeam Aviation Challenge, in which airlines collaborated to conduct increasingly sustainable flights, was a career highlight.

"It was exhilarating to sit alongside our KLM partners and see the flight crew in action with FlightPulse on the flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, especially as a former commercial pilot," she says. "At GE Aerospace we often talk about our mission to 'lift people up and bring them home safely.' I can't think of a better way of paying tribute to my friend and her family than to spend my days making sure that flying becomes safer with each flight - because behind every statistic is a name, and a story that deserves to be told."

GE Aerospace is looking for talented, innovative engineers globally to help advance aerospace for future generations. Explore opportunities and apply online for engineering roles at invent.ge/engineering to see your ideas take flight.

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