a. Unruly passengers aboard commercial flights have become a critical issue for consumer airliners, federal agencies, and other key aviation stakeholders. In the past few years, unruly passenger confrontations rose exponentially. Through patchwork of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulatory fines, civil penalties, criminal sanctions, there are enforcement measures available to combat pa...

In June of this year, the FAA sponsored a meeting of representatives of the aviation industry to review problems associated with aging aircraft. While much of this meeting addressed issues of hardware, metal fatigue, and corrosion, there was a discussion of human factors in maintenance. Today's meeting reflects a growing interest in human factors and its potential contribution to continuing avi...

Over the past decade, two separate approaches have been developed to augment the Global Positioning System to meet the accuracy, integrity, continuity, and availability needs of civil aviation users. One utilizes a network of reference stations spread across a large area and derives a single set of differential corrections that is relayed to users via GPS-like signals from Geosynchronous (GEO) ...

The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has initiated the development of a causal risk model of commercial air transport in support of the System Approach for Safety Oversight (SASO) program. The model uses the so-called Hybrid Causal Logic (HCL) methodology which combines Event Sequence Diagrams (ESD), fault trees (FT) and Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN). The model is hierarchic...

One of the major barriers to wider use of adaptive controllers in commercial aviation is the lack of appropriate certification procedures. In order to be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), an aircraft controller is expected to meet a set of guidelines on functionality and reliability while not negatively impacting other systems or safety of aircraft operations. Due to their...

Department of Transportation in the interest of information exchange. The United States Government assumes no liability for the contents or use thereof. The United States Government does not endorse products or manufacturers. Trade or manufacturer's names appear herein solely because they are considered essential to the objective of this report. This document does not constitute FAA certificati...

Federal aviation regulations prohibit airline pilots from flying beyond the age of 60 years. However, the relation between pilot age and flight safety has not been rigorously assessed using empirical data. From 1987 to 1997, the authors followed a cohort of 3,306 commuter air carrier and air taxi pilots who were aged 45-54 years in 1987. During the follow-up period, the pilots accumulated a tot...