Risk Analysis

Risk analysis is used to quantify the risk exposure of flight. It accounts for:

• Common failure modes and their characteristics alongside their probabilities for an aircraft
• Operating conditions of the aircraft including the ground speed and altitude
• Natural and human-made features of the operating environment

These factors are combined to determine 1st and 3rd party risk exposure for the average case of flight and provide insight in to practices that can help reduce risk. The results of this analysis can be used to visually show areas of high-risk (typically urban population centres) and low-risk (rural areas) to a high-fidelity and allow for automatic optimisation of flightpaths.

Note

Risk is determined in a directionally state-agnostic way and therefore presents as a conservative view of risk exposure regardless of the direction of travel of the actual Flightplan.

Within the Web Application an overlay is provided (within the Geo Intel tab) to clearly see these regions which intuitively allows the modification of Flightplans to reduce risk exposure. A numerical indicator of risk exposure is also provided over the duration of a Flightplan.

Risk Minimisation with Pathing

The risk of a Flightplan can be reduced by generating a new flightpath which directs the aircraft around high-risk areas. Pathing can be used considering the waypoints of the Flightplan as “Checkpoints”, allowing a new flightpath to be generated automatically which will contain these waypoints but also contain additional waypoints which direct the aircraft around high-risk areas.

Caution

A Checkpoint placed in a high-risk area will still become a waypoint in the result, therefore any Checkpoints used must be considered carefully such that reaching them is within an acceptable tolerance of risk.

Ground Risk Bias

When generating a flightpath that has reduced risk there is often a trade-off between the time taken for the flight and the overall risk. It may often be more desirable to accept more risk for a more direct flightpath than the theoretical minimum risk path. To allow for this, a “Ground Risk Bias” may be used which acts as a weighting between considering a fully risk-minimised flightpath versus a direct flightpath.