Professional airline pilots should be in far better health at all ages than the general population. Every six months, U.S. airline pilots must undergo a first-class flight physical examination, which is defined and required by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). To continue flying as pilots, they must pass the physical examination. Airline pilots reach age 60 (their mandatory-retire...

Altimetry System Error (ASE) is a measure of the height-keeping performance of an aircraft. In airspace where the Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum (RVSM) is applied, the importance of accurate aircraft height-keeping is magnified. ASE is not detectible in routine operations; specialized measurement equipment is necessary to independently measure the errors. To be eligible for RVSM operations...

A flight demonstration was conducted in August 1997 at the Hartsfield Atlanta (ATL) International Airport as part of low visibility landing and surface operations (LVLASO) research activities. This research was aimed at investigating technology to improve the safety and efficiency of aircraft movements on the surface during the operational phases of roll-out, turnoff, and taxi in any weather co...

INTRODUCTION Hot-air balloon tours are FAR Part 91-governed balloon rides conducted for compensation or hire. Part 91, General Aviation, in general involves the least strict federal regulations and accounts for the majority of aviation crashes and fatalities. METHODS National Transportation Safety Board reports of hot-air balloon tour crashes in the United States from 2000 through 2011 were r...

The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are currently developing a set of enhancements to the User Request Evaluation Tool (URET) conflict probe. These enhancements are designed to further the support provided by URET for strategic Air Traffic Control, by extending the URET analysis and detection capabilities ...

One goal in the development of a Synthetic Vision System (SVS) is to create a system that can be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for use at various flight criticality levels. As part of NASA’s Aviation Safety Program, Ohio University and NASA Langley have been involved in the research and development of real-time terrain database integrity monitors for SVS. Integrity moni...

Wildfires present a complex applied risk management environment, but relatively little attention has been paid to behavioral and cognitive responses to risk among public agency wildfire managers. This study investigates responses to risk, including probability weighting and risk aversion, in a wildfire management context using a survey-based experiment administered to federal wildfire managers....

Aviation disaster prevention has always been of interest to homeland security, especially after the recent use of aircrafts as weapons by terrorists. With better understanding of the deficiency of different types of aircraft and their corresponding effects on the craft’s safety, better maintenance and response plans can be devised to prevent disasters from occurring. In this paper, we present a...