APPLICATION OF UNCERTAINTY MANAGEMENT TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY OF HARD LANDING CRITICALITY ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

摘要

Hard landing detection is an issue for aircraft safety and efficient airline operations. This paper outlines a project to improve the criticality assessment criteria for a legacy aircraft family, with the specific aim to limit the impact of suspected hard landings on airline operations while maintaining today's level of safety. It is shown that Monte Carlo analysis can be used to choose the criteria based on statistical evidence, enabling scatter to be reduced and reliability to be increased, thus permitting criticality thresholds to be expanded. Moreover this paper demonstrates that from Monte Carlo analysis the reliability of the criteria can be quantified in terms of overload detection and false positive rates, hence thresholds can be set probabilistically. It is recognised that the Monte Carlo approach has a number of limitations and should be considered to be a complementary means for improving the criticality criteria alongside deterministic studies, fleet surveys and operational experience.