This position is located in the Air Traffic Organization (ATO), Safety and Technical Training Service Unit, Policy and Performance Directorate, Safety Performance Group. This group is responsible for identifying human performance issues in the National Airspace System (NAS) and for ensuring that effective mitigations, plans, and efforts are in place.
Duties
The Operations Research Analyst (ORSA) applies experience and advanced knowledge of professional and scientific work requiring the design, development, and adaptation of mathematical, statistical, and other scientific methods to identify human performance risks and issues. Uses analytical processes to perform multiple, varying, and complex assignments, such as collecting, reducing, and displaying data to measure mitigation effectiveness, metric tracking, and to design interactive dashboards. This work is performed under the limited direction of the project or team manager and contributes to the ATOs ability to evaluate and mitigate aviation incidents caused by human performance errors and issues.
The ORSA acts as a contributing specialist on large work activities to coordinate projects involving the development of safety studies designed to analyze aviation information. Uses project or program management principles to coordinate project activities by maintaining project documents, scheduling meetings, identifying and resolving problems. Identifies and informs management of problems that require their attention. Defines, plans, and organizes assigned resources to accomplish organizational objectives. Allocates resources to accomplish small work-activities within established schedules. Provides guidance to lower-level technical staff on how to solve difficult technical issues.
Applies mathematical methods and techniques to analyze aviation safety data to identify risks and issues associated with human factors, human performance, and fatigue. Possesses knowledge of the aviation operations to develops and recommends techniques to address problem situations related to human factors and performance, such as controller fatigue and pilot read back errors. Utilizes advanced data analysis techniques such as text mining, word cloud, statistical significance, correlations, and regression analysis, to design and integrate interactive dashboards that provide the team with tools to monitor and predict risks and issues. Uses business analytic software such as Tableau, PowerBI, Python, Excel, Share Point, Hyperion DataMart, or SAP Business Objects to evaluate mitigation strategies.
Contacts are internal and external to the Safety and Technical Training Service Unit, and may include representatives from other Service Units. The ORSA may act as a key technical point of contact for activities related to Human Factors and Performance. Contributes to the management/technical reports. Communicate the overall results of a project or work activity to senior management, the aviation and aerospace industries, and other external parties. The Team Manager reviews work periodically, typically at major milestones and at completion, for technical compliance and alignment with the requirements of the project or other work activity.
Although established policies and procedures provide guidance most assignments, the analyst is allowed considerable discretion to select the most appropriate approach or to recommend new approaches. Provides recommendations to improve work processes. The Team Manager reviews work periodically, typically at major milestones and at completion, for technical compliance and alignment with the requirements of the project or other work activity. The work activities typically support and may be vital to the success of projects or activities of one or more organizational units, subdivisions, and LOBs/SOs.