Leaders across the transportation sectors underscored the importance of collaboration to ensure the safety of the nation’s complex air travel network at a panel last week.
The discussion on April 30 was part of American Airlines’ 11th annual Safety Management System Industry Forum, which took place at American’s Fort Worth-based Skyview campus adjacent to DFW International Airport.
FAA deputy administrator Chris Rocheleau led the panel off with an encouraging assessment.
“I think people don’t always understand or appreciate the fact that every single day we’re handling anywhere from 35,000 to 55,000 flights, about 3 million people, safely through the air transportation system,” Rocheleau said.
He added, however, that safety is a journey, not a destination.
“We’re constantly looking for opportunities to make the system safer, particularly when we think about what’s coming online,” he said, referring to pilotless drones, commercial space launches and increases in commercial and business jet operations.
As an example, Rocheleau pointed to how the agency conducted “hot spot” reviews nationwide after the January 2025 collision of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger plane in Washington, D.C. The reviews focused on identifying and reducing risks in areas where rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft operate in close proximity.
“What was key, and this is where I’m particularly proud, is we were starting to use tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify those hot spots that we needed to tackle,” Rocheleau said.
The conversation then turned toward cooperation and sharing of information between entities that are traditionally competitors in their respective domains, or that have customer-supplier relationships.
Mohammed Ali, president and CEO of General Electric Aerospace commercial engines and services, emphasized that aviation companies must collaborate on safety issues, even with competitors.
“We don’t compete on safety. Nobody ever should,” Ali said. “There are many times in which we have a (lesson learned) and we’ll share it with the FAA, who will say, ‘Would you be open to share it with your competitors?’ and we say, ‘Absolutely.’”
David Seymour, American Airlines chief operating officer, agreed and said an aviation incident affecting one airline can have repercussions across the entire industry internationally.
Seymour likes to refer to the amount of information available to be studied as a “data ocean” rather than the traditional “data lake” moniker.
“The next incident or issue you have out there is in the data,” he said. “We have to go find it.”
DFW International Airport CEO Chris McLaughlin said the FAA’s Safety Management System could improve data sharing across the aviation industry and create a broader culture of learning.
“You build out the ecosystem beyond one airport,” McLaughlin said. “Now you can ultimately get 450 airports that all have the ability to share data amongst each other, and then with our airline partners and manufacturers, to make sure that we don’t just learn what went wrong locally, but globally.”
Rocheleau urged smaller companies and startups entering the aviation industry to learn from established organizations and build strong safety practices from the start.
“Learn as much as you can and engage the people that have been doing this professionally for over a decade or more, and build that into your system early on,” he said. “Make sure that you’re open with your data, open with your experiences, and sharing that across the ecosystem.”
Doug Wilhelm is a member of the Fort Worth Report Documenters crew and a freelance writer.
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