Ural Airlines received a document certifying the carrier’s compliance with the regulations on collection, processing, and analysis of in-flight data when using A 320 civil aircraft on June 1, 2007. This certificate means the company’s experts are permitted to decode A 320 flight data recorders on their own. Remarkably, there are only three Russian carriers at the moment that are capable of performing such tasks independently: Aeroflot, Siberia, and Ural Airlines.

The airline analysts produced 157 flight transcripts within the first month of working on their own.

'We’ve only got two Airbus planes now, but another one is going to arrive as soon as this December thanks to a leasing agreement we’ve signed. Two more planes are due to arrive next spring, and seven Airbuses are expected by 2012. This is why getting a certificate was simply a must for our company,’ Sergey Zentsov from the carrier’s In-flight Data Analysis Department says.

Ural Airlines must collect and decode the in-flight data since this is a demand imposed by Rosaviation (the state air transport agency), with the proportion of decoded flights coming to at least 90% of all the flights performed by the carrier. Ural Airlines has been decoding all of its TU 154 flights and 99% of its Airbus 320 flights, which means the information is processed after nearly every flight and is then used to look into the crew’s actions to find some possible mistakes and avoid them in future. What is more, this helps to diagnose technical problems during the flight very early on.

The company gets an additional benefit of being able to cut back on maintenance expenses from doing the decoding themselves, and, most importantly, Ural Airlines is thus able to prevent emergencies and make its flights even safer, the carrier’s press officer reports.