An Uninhabited Aerial System Safety Analysis Model (USAM)

The National Airspace System (NAS) in the United States will become a complex array of commercial and general aviation aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, reusable launch vehicles, rotorcraft, airports, air traffic control, weather services, and maintenance operations, among others. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) projects that by 2025 air traffic will increase by more than 50 percent with 1.1 billion passengers a year and more than 85,000 flights every 24 hours contributing to further delays and congestion in the sky. This increased system complexity necessitates the application of systematic safety risk analysis methods to understand and eliminate where possible, reduce, and/or mitigate risk factors. The product of this effort is the development of an Uninhabited Aerial System (UAS) safety analysis model, which hereafter is called USAM. The USAM effort proposed herein is an extension of current efforts underway by the UAS community, and it extends these efforts by incorporating UAS scenarios and encounter geometries to populate existing safety analysis models, thereby producing credible future UAS safety metrics