Case Study: The MITRE Corporation achieves improved safety and regulatory efficiency with Cloudera

Mitre improved safety, regulatory effectiveness and compliance

The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) supports the FAA by analyzing massive, heterogeneous aviation data to improve safety and efficiency across the National Airspace System. CAASD needed to recreate historical operational scenarios from flight sensors, voice recordings, weather, terrain and flight-plan data—over a petabyte—to detect safety events and drive regulatory risk analysis, but airline participation required strong data governance and secure handling of sensitive data.

CAASD consolidated its analytics on a single, governed Hortonworks Data Platform data lake managed with Apache Ambari and YARN, enabling resource sharing and easier operations while adopting Spark and Storm for advanced analytics. The platform produced derived “flight story” data products and historical archives that uncover safety hotspots, support mitigation measures, and inform regulatory changes (including revised separation standards estimated to save ~$20M in fuel and reduce cumulative taxi/departure time), with ongoing expansion of global and high‑density weather data to further improve NAS safety and efficiency.

The MITRE Corporation