Safety

Lightning strikes pose a severe threat to the United States (US) National Airspace System (NAS). Although the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) implements lightning protection practices and procedures to protect personnel, electronic equipment, and structures within the NAS, many lightning-induced outages still occur. To date we found that most research on lightning-induced facility outages has focused on understanding the physical processes of lightning strike effects on aircraft and airport ramp operations. Very little research has been done on examining the overall patterns and...

This report is written in response to the State of California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), Division of Aeronautics, relating to the need to update the 2011 version of the California Airport Land Use Planning (ALUP) Handbook. The purpose of this technical report and its supplementary materials is to provide a robust scientific foundation for the final Handbook update publication for airport land use compatibility planning, which will be created soon by Caltrans. In this study, optimized are visualizations of spatial distribution patterns of aviation accidents across 259 airports...

This article presents a method of estimating the risk of a mid-air collision. The proposed method is an enhancement of the traditional aviation safety model - Integrated Safety Assessment Model (ISAM) - developed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and EUROCONTROL. ISAM is a mix of event-based models and fault trees that identifies causes of 35 different types of aviation accidents. While useful for conceptual understanding of accidents, the model does not handle human-technical or inter-system interactions. These drawbacks are especially evident when assessing safety impact of...

This study introduces a logistic regression-based stress level metric to (1) assess stress levels of Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) and pilots, and (2) detect off-nominal events using audio-derived features. With over 16,264 labeled ATC-pilot utterances and scalar and multi-dimensional speech attributes, it is demonstrated that a developed Stress Score metric can capture meaningful distinctions between the nominal and off-nominal utterances. The Beta distribution fit further captures the skewed nature of Stress Scores, indicating that the model follows a non-linear but quantifiable pattern...