Research and development related to human factors in aviation has traditionally focused on the pilot and the cockpit. However, recent reports have attributed 18% of all accidents to maintenance factors. The aircraft inspection/maintenance system is a complex one with many interrelated human and machine components. The linchpin of the system is however, the human. Since it is difficult to elimin...

A study investigating what factors are present leading to pilots submitting voluntary anomaly reports regarding their flight performance was conducted. Diffusion Maps (DM) were selected as the method of choice for performing dimensionality reduction on text records for this study. Diffusion Maps have seen successful use in other domains such as image classification and pattern recognition. High...

Together, the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) can guide aircraft down to 200 ft above the runway. This approach procedure is referred to as Localizer Performance with Vertical guidance (LPV)-200. Approach guidance using GPS and WAAS has many advantages over traditional precision approach guidance using the Instrument Landing System (ILS) and the numb...

Safety in aviation has often been compared with safety in healthcare. Following a recent article in this journal, the UK government set up an Independent Patient Safety Investigation Service, to emulate a similar well-established body in aviation. On the basis of a detailed review of relevant publications that examine patient safety in the context of aviation practice, we have drawn up a table ...

INTRODUCTION The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Office of Aerospace Medicine sets medical standards needed to protect the public and pilots from death or injury due to incapacitation of the pilot. As a part of this process, toxicology testing is performed by the FAA on almost every pilot who is fatally injured in an aviation accident to determine the medical condition of the pilot, medic...

Various mathematical methods and metaheuristic approaches have been developed in the past to address optimization problems related to aviation security. One such problem deals with a key component of an aviation security system, baggage and passenger screening devices. The decision process to determine which devices to procure by aviation and security officials, and how and where to deploy them...

range; see Lee et al. 2009). Aircraft emissions are expected to increase with projected growth in aviation and will likely result in enhanced environmental impacts unless scientif ically informed mitigation measures are implemented. Environmental protection is an important component of the U.S. Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen; information online at www.jpdo. gov/nextgen.asp)....

This paper considers decision support for incident management in aviation security. One of the key issues in Aviation Security is that despite their catastrophic magnitude, incidents are rare and their precursors are sometimes hard to identify. Typically decision-makers have a limited time window available to them in which to identify a situation, select an appropriate response and tailor it to...

The objective of this paper is the definition of a new methodology for carrying out security risk assessment in the air traffic management (ATM) domain so as to enhance security awareness and integrate secure and cost-effective design objectives. This process is carried out by modelling the system, identifying the assets, threats and vulnerabilities, prioritizing the threats and proposing cost-...