Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley, Mark Hansen presented the NASA Berkeley Aviation Data Science Seminar: Data Analytics for Flight Trajectories and Trajectory Anomalies April 15, 2020..Abstract: Trajectory analysis is one of the canonical applications of data science to aviation. In this talk, I will summarize some standard methods and recent research related to the analysis of flight trajectories. First, trajectory clustering methods will be overviewed and applied to identify common routes between selected US domestic city pairs. We will discuss feature engineering for trajectories in order to investigate how weather, winds, and traffic management initiatives affect the assignment of individual flights to different alternative routes. A generative model, which predicts the future evolution of a specific flight trajectory based on its flight plan, weather conditions, and trajectory history, will then be presented. Finally, we will consider the identification of “anomalous” trajectories with specific focus on the analysis and prediction of “go-arounds” of flights attempting to land at JFK airport.
Mark Hansen
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley
Mark Hansen is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated from Yale with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Philosophy in 1980, and has a PhD in Engineering Science and a Masters in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, Dr. Hansen worked as a physicist at the Environmental Protection Agency. Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1988, he has led transportation research projects in urban transportation planning, air transport systems modeling, air traffic flow management, aviation systems performance analysis, aviation safety, aviation environmental analysis, and air transport economics. He has taught graduate and undergraduate transportation courses in economics, systems analysis, planning, probability and statistics, and air transportation. Professor Hansen is the Berkeley co-director of the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, a multi-university consortium sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. He is former Chair of Transportation Research Board Committee AV-060, Airport and Airspace Capacity and Delay. He has served as Associate Editor of Operations Research and Transportation Research E.