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.
Description
Keywords
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