Review of Proactive Safety Metrics for Rotorcraft Operations and Improvements Using Model-Based Parameter Synthesis and Data Fusion

摘要

Historically, rotorcraft have featured higher accident and incident rates compared to commercial and fixed-wing general aviation. Safety improvements are currently sought through the adoption of flight data monitoring, a voluntary and proactive safety program where retrospective analysis of flight data records identifies precursors of safety-critical events and tracks improvements pursuant of corrective measures. This manuscript provides a review of flight data monitoring and elaborates on the unique and significant challenges of its implementation for rotorcraft operations. We further present two enhancements to current practice in the form of performance model integration for improved safety event definition and detection, and fusion with external data sources to evaluate meaningful safety metrics supplemental to a priori operational event detection. For the former, we examine helicopter autorotation and demonstrate that a model-based approach significantly improves characterization of operational safety boundaries and misidentification of safety events. For the latter, we demonstrate the integration of obstacle data and flight data records to evaluate collision risk, a critical safety issue in low-altitude rotorcraft operations, latent in a given rotorcraft flight. The computational burden associated with the enhancements is briefly discussed, noting very modest costs but requiring mindful adoption of data and analytical function fidelity.