Capstone project statement of intention guidelines

Aircraft Safety

The FAA as an institution is occupied with creating new regulations, but does not effectively model accident prevention according to system models to models. While terrorism and hijacking have been the center of aviation regulation in the last ten years, we must also look at and maintain the more minor issues. As a result aviation complications happen that are time-consuming and annoying. For this reason, such conditions could impair the whole industry as a whole. For this reason, proper risk and safety modeling is essential is necessary in a systems fashion.

Statement of Intention

There is much talk about airline safety, but many times risk and safety modeling to deal with the most common accidents has been neglected. In the meantime, the FAA is occupied creating new regulations, little attention is being paid to proper systems modeling. While terrorism and hijacking have been the center of aviation regulation in the last ten years, we must also look at and maintain the more minor issues. As a result aviation complications that are time-consuming and annoying. For this reason, such conditions could impair the whole industry as a whole. For this reason, proper risk and safety modeling is essential.

Research Problem

It is necessary to create proper risk and modeling for civil aviation management.

Research Question

How can research risk and safety modeling in be improved in civil aviation.

Literature Review

The FAA is doing a good job of creating new regulations for the industry; the problem lies on how they enforce the new regulations. The FAA must enforce the regulations that are issued to protect against errors and faulty equipment. However, low fare airlines and overbooking of fares put intensive pressure on the system, causing accidents and causing the FAA to act in a crisis mode. In a paper presented at the Third International Conference on Research in Air Transportation, the authors present a study on how to reform risk and safety modeling in civil aviation.

Risk and safety are have always been considered most important in terms of the operational characteristics of civil aviation (Netjasov & Janic, 2008, 169). Usually, these characteristics refer to the potential of air traffic accidents. As such, safety problems are many times treated as simply an another issue that must be dealt with in addition to other sundry effects such as air and water/soil pollution, noise, land-use, waste and airport congestion. The issues many times fall to the cracks simply due to their being so many and therefor warrant the setup of adequate regulation schemes that are based on whole system technology designs and operations. To do this, the paper focused on four categories of methods/models for risk and safety assessment, including causal issues for aircraft and air traffic control/management operations, third-party risk, collision risk and human error (ibid., 170-174). These four categories need to be considered holistically and as such a set so as to make sure that the problems are systematically dealt with (ibid.).

One of the common collision risks is that of aircraft striking birds. Bird -- Animal Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) program managers need to have the maximum amount of data possible to accomplish their mission. Bird censuses and bird-strike events in and around air fields are used to formulate airfield management decisions and calculate the risk of bird hazards (Klope, Beason,, Nohara & Begier, 2009, 208-209). Technological aids such as avian radar are being used as new tools to facilitate the continuous sampling of bird activity to supplement visual censuses. The measure of risk is expressed as the ratio of bird strikes occurring every 100,000 flying hours. This measure is however relatively insensitive to technical improvements. Therefore a reduction in safety is not anticipated but is calculated afterwards when increased bird strikes have already happened. Therefore, BASH managers are disadvantaged because they are able to respond only after bird strikes happen (ibid., 209-212). The authors introduce a new method for risk assessment based upon near-miss events that complement risk calculations based upon reported bird strikes. Improvements in digital avian tracking

radars help biologists to monitor and assess near-miss events. Near-miss events occur much more frequently. By adding in the near miss data, estimates of bird strikes are made more accurate (ibid., 213-214).

In the jet age, many forget that rotary driven aircraft make up a great percentage of the civil aviation fleet. In a study published in the journal of American Meteorological Society, the dynamic effects associated with approaching cold fronts cause amplification of the lee wave and rotor,.

This creates increasingly hazardous flight conditions at nearby airports. Quick winds measured by Doppler LIDAR (light detection and ranging) and 915-MHz wind profilers have been found to produce light-to-moderate turbulence for a research aircraft making missed approaches. The Doppler LIDAR's detailed measurements of lee-wave -- rotor systems allow evaluations of RAMS' ability to capture these complex wind features. Numerical simulations tied with technology help to predict the effects of rapidly evolving wind systems upon rotor aircraft. In any event, new technologies need to be rapidly integrated into the civil aviation system to anticipate safety hazard events (Darby & Poulos, 2006, 2857-2873).