Aviation risk assessment: Analyzing the critical boundary conditions that can affect the risk of runway-related accidents

The safety of runway-related operations has been always the main scope in airport risk assessment. The importance of the runway safety is getting even more significant with the increase in the air transport demands over the last decade. In this regard, this study focuses on identifying most influencing boundary conditions on the safety of runway-related operations by adopting a practical aviation risk assessment model developed by Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP). One International Airport, as the case study, is selected and simulated through adopted model to assess the safety of the aircraft operations in excursion events including Landing Overruns (LDOR), Landing Undershoots (LDUS), Landing Veer-offs (LDVO), Takeoff Overruns (TOOR), and Takeoff Veer-offs (TOVO). For this matter, the operating aircraft characteristics, Runway Safety Area’s (RSA’s) geometry, one year of daily operation data, and the real-time weather data for the same year of the selected airport are collected. As an outcome of this simulation, four different sensitivity analyses based on changes in runway geometry, weather conditions, runway end safety area infrastructure (e.g., presence of arresting system), and airport annual movements are conducted to evaluate the impacts of these parameters on the probability of occurrence of runway-related accidents. These sensitivity analyses clarify the dependency of aircraft ground operations’ safety on airport’s boundary conditions, which help airport operators to increase their runways safety by strengthening their weaknesses.