Integrated Surface and Approach Risk Monitor

The increase in safety incidents in the terminal airspace and on the airport surface over the past few years highlights the need for in-time, reliable monitoring and alerting technologies that fill in gaps in currently available systems. For fixed-wing aircraft operations, the most critical phase of flight is during take-off and landing and any interactions during this phase can lead to catastrophic consequences. In busy airports with large number of arrivals and departures, the operational margins are tight, and errors can have ripple effects on the traffic at the airport. With the Integrated Surface and Approach Risk Monitor (ISARM) we propose a tool to monitor the interaction among approach, runway, and taxiway operations and avoid incidents before they occur. ISARM translates measured safety metrics into actionable information through an aircraft risk model for the cockpit, and a runway risk status model for tower control. Several incidents between aircraft on the ground and approach in the past few years arose from the lack of a coherent forward-looking logic model for safety. ISARM offers a discrete event sequence safety logical model for approach and take-off operations that model actions of different aircraft in the airspace into a sequence of necessary discrete steps for safe operation. Similar to a flight checklist that verifies operations of each system within an aircraft, the discrete safety sequence model provides an operational checklist for safely operating at a given runway. The specific risks to operations at a runway can either be isolated (e.g., pilot error) or persistent (e.g., complexity of operations, poor surface conditions, etc.). We will leverage our expertise in speech-to-text models, real-time data processing, and integrated monitoring to build the Phase I POC for ATL and JFK. We will demonstrate and validate the functionality on live data for the two airports by the end of Phase I.