Jim Willson Email & Phone Number

Lititz, Pa, Us

Mclean, Va, Us

Mclean, Va, Us

System safety engineer with the Safety Concepts and Evolution Department, functioning as the FAA's Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). Current and past projects include:- Led team partnering with the FAA in collaboration with other organizations as necessary to conceptualize and develop use cases and candidate regulatory approaches needed to address eVTOL and AAM operational suitability and certification requirements.- Led team developing an approach and methodology for performing a Systems Safety Assessment, as a component of the Veterans Health Administration's HSI domain, Safety & Occupational Health, that will be considered to help guide a Systems Safety Assessment. - Led team that researched and developed an SMS program manual for a leading Automated Vehicle (AV) OEM/Operator. Developed a new Field Safety Program as part of the SMS.- 21st Century Commercial Space Licensing: Provided QMS and SMS support for the redesign of the licensing process for commercial space launches. Further improved efficiency with new decisions aids.- BEYOND and Partnership for Safety Program (PSP) Technical Support SME: Provided technical and procedural independent assessments that helped inform FAA operational approval processes, including support of societal and economic assessment of UAS operations, as requested. Assisted in the development of a holistic risk framework that incorporates societal benefits/risks.- Safety Management Systems (SMS): Guiding customers fully implement an SMS by instructing SMS course ware, evaluating their current SMS system or per-existing systems prior to implementation, and assessing safety culture both internally and across organizational lines. - Providing guidance and strategy inputs from an operational perspective on methodology to make the national airspace safer as we evolve into a ever increasingly complex systems and applying system safety theoretical processes to interactions between systems.

Memphis, Tn, Us

■ Selected to lead the implementation of the Everbridge Crisis Management cloud software. Automated the crisis response program by defining the requirements that included incident response and employee notification. The new system identifies, assesses and monitors risk by tracking the travel for over 1600 pilots flying around the globe. In the month of August 2020, the system sent 71 notifications and launched 32 incidents and 1 critical event.■ Led a cross-functional team of subject matter experts analysts to evaluate an enterprise-wide risk program initiated after a poorly performed actual accident response. Mapped over 45 end-to-end processes with controls, partnered with 7 diverse business groups to define roles and responsibilities, and created a new survey to interview first responder employees to identify gaps. Key result findings were 3 process misses, and widespread misunderstanding of roles.■ Presented to executive leadership and documented 3 new process flow diagrams, 2 new organizational structure charts and 2 decision making tools that reengineered the crisis response program, including the drill framework. This resulted in first responders and team members feeling calmer in a crisis, a better understanding of their roles, and reduced the duration of individual conference call times by 50%, over a period of up to 18 hours per crisis.■ Advised over six business departments at FedEx and the vendor as to how to integrate their individual emergency plans into the new Everbridge Crisis Management Software. Created procedural firewalls using contact groups, record types and standardized naming conventions for template titles. Standards developed are currently being compiled into a system governance policy.

Memphis, Tn, Us

■ Created and deployed a new FedEx risk program that included creating the design team, benchmark policies and procedures, leading the launch of new software to identify risk events, defining operating team structure and roles, and the creation of a daily operating process. Program has been officially operating for 9 years, with a range of 30 to 50 annual correction actions implemented. The new risk program reduced fleet-wide at-risk approach to landing rate to 1/4 of the current passenger airline rate. Reduced fleet 757 model landings that are at risk of a tail impact by 70%. ■ Facilitated over 5 formal risk assessments by creating a team representing all departmental stakeholder's SMEs, defining questions. Produced over 580 operational safety performance reports that include the reviewed and validated risk events, results of data analysis, and recommendations for mitigation. Present results to senior executive team on a monthly basis. ■ Led two cross-departmental LEAN initiatives. The first initiative was to facilitate a more efficient hand-off process for flights discovered to need maintenance inspections, reducing missed inspections by 95%. The second initiative reduced the supply system delays for aircraft data card processing by 20% by reducing the number of touch-points where batching of the cards occurs. In addition, a second recommendation showed a $1M per year savings if the data cards were replaced by a wireless system.

Memphis, Tn, Us

■ Led the investigation for FedEx Flight 80, international aircraft accident response in Narita, Japan. Selected to be the Lead Technical Advisor to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for FedEx Express. In this capacity, I served as liaison between the Japanese Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Boeing Corporation and FedEx.Developed an emergent data process for discovering the root cause of industry-wide MD-11 landing accidents. This discovery was the foundation for the 2016 FedEx Quality Driven Management (QDM) Gold Cup winning project.

■ Served as Vice President and Board of Directors of a public/private partnership, non-profit organization, fostering the exchange and dissemination of safety information through training and educational programs for the aviation industry.■ Guided development of a more user-friendly safety risk management software system, now in commercial service.■ Approved budget and finances for the 501(c)(3), including investigation of funds sent to primary vendor.■ Established goals for sponsored conferences and software training seminars.

Fort Worth, Texas, Us

■ Provided technical oversight of FAA’s AFS-420 Land and Hold Short Operations (LAHSO) air traffic modeling of Chicago O’Hare Intl. Brokered final agreement between FAA-ATO, FAA-AFS, NATCA, ALPA, Allied Pilots Assn., American Airlines and United Airlines by facilitating a safety risk assessment (SRA) using Mil-STD 882-C.■ Managed the crisis command center and accident response during both the September 11, 2001 terrorism events and the American Airlines Flight 587 accident, two months later in New York, NY.

Bs, Aerospace Engineering

Ms, Aeronautical Engineering