Quantitative Risk Analysis of Obstacle Limitation Standards

Date
2015-06-10
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Abstract
Obstacle limitation surfaces (OLS) are the main safeguard against objects that can pose a hazard to aircraft operations at and around the airports. The standard dimensions of the most of these surfaces were estimated using the pilot's experience at the time when they were included in to the standard documents. As a result, some of these standards may have been overestimated while others may not provide an adequate level of safety. With airports moving to the Safety Management System (SMS) approach to design and operations safety, proper evaluation of the level of safety provided by OLS at specific sites becomes great importance to airport operators.There is no published evidence, however, for the estimation of the safety level provided by the existing OLS standards. Moreover, the rationale used by the ICAO to establish existing OLS standards is not readily available in the standard documents. Therefore this study attempts to collect actual flight path data using information provided by air traffic control radars and construct a methodology to assess the probability of aircraft deviating from their intended/protected path. The extension of the developed methodology can be used to estimate the OLS dimensions that provide an acceptable safety level for the aircraft operations. This will be helpful to estimate safe and efficient standard dimensions of the OLS and assess the risk level of objects to the aircraft operations around airports. In order to assess the existing standards and show the applications of the methodology, three case studies were conducted using aircraft data collected from Ottawa (CYOW), Calgary (CYYC) and Edmonton (CYEG) International Airports.
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Engineering--Civil
Citation
Sandaradura, A. S. (2015). Quantitative Risk Analysis of Obstacle Limitation Standards (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27508