BACKGROUND Specimens from aviation accident pilot fatalities are submitted to the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI) for toxicological analyses. Trends of fatal amateur-built aircraft accidents and toxicological findings in the associated pilot fatalities have not been examined. METHODS Fatal amateur-built aircraft accidents that occurred during 1990-2009 were evaluated by retrieving in...

Visual detection of aircraft by human observers is an important element of aviation safety. To assess and ensure safety, it would be useful to be able to be able to predict the visibility, to a human observer, of an aircraft of specified size, shape, distance, and coloration. Examples include assuring safe separation among aircraft and between aircraft and unmanned vehicles, design of airport c...

Most passengers, airlines, and the aircraft industry in general are used to very high safety standards and precautions surrounding aircraft systems. As the computerization of aircraft steadily progresses, the question of security, i.e. the protection against intentional manipulations, becomes increasingly relevant. This article focuses on these security challenges. In particular, it adds the fo...

The fractional aircraft market is the fastest growing segment of the business aircraft industry. A fractional aircraft operation is complex—essentially an unscheduled airline in a constantly changing environment. Bombardier Flexjet implemented a comprehensive three-module optimization system to simultaneously maximize its use of aircraft, crews, and facilities. AD OPT Technologies designed the ...

The integration of unmanned aircraft into the national airspace system requires new methods of ensuring collision avoidance. For unmanned aircraft a capability to ‘detect-and-avoid’ is required to replace the traditional ‘see-andavoid’ performed by pilots. The initial results from testing a Mobile Aircraft Tracking System (MATS) show that this ground-based radar system can track a ScanEagle unm...

This paper discusses a novel approach to associate and re ne aircraft track data from multiple radar sites. The approach provides enhanced aircraft track accuracy and time synchronization that is compatible with modern air tra c management analysis and simulation tools. Unlike existing approaches where the number of aircraft in the radar data must be assumed, this approach requires no such prio...

The problem of deciding how to land aircraft approaching an airport involves assigning each aircraft to an appropriate runway, computing a landing sequence for each runway and scheduling the landing time for each aircraft. Runway allocation, sequencing and scheduling for each aircraft must ensure the scheduled landing time lies within a predefined time window and meet separation time requiremen...

Abstract High performance aircraft of the future will be designed lighter, more maneuverable, and operate over an ever expanding flight envelope. One of the largest differences from the flight control perspective between current and future advanced aircraft is elasticity. Over the last decade, dynamic inversion methodology has gained considerable popularity in application to highly maneuverable...

This paper focuses on the aircraft landing problem that is to assign landing times to aircraft approaching the airport under consideration. Each aircraft’s landing time must be in a time interval encompassing a target landing time. If the actual landing time deviates from the target landing time additional costs occur which depend on the amount of earliness and lateness, respectively. The objec...