Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Tech Transfer
An Uninhabited Aerial System Safety Analysis Model (USAM)
Project Description
The National Airspace System (NAS) in the United States will become a complex array of commercial and general aviation aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, reusable launch vehicles, rotorcraft, airports, air traffic control, weather services, and maintenance operations, among others. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) projects that by 2025 air traffic will increase by more than 50 percent with 1.1 billion passengers a year and more than 85,000 flights every 24 hours contributing to further delays and congestion in the sky. This increased system complexity necessitates the application of systematic safety risk analysis methods to understand and eliminate where possible, reduce, and/or mitigate risk factors. The product of this effort is the development of an Uninhabited Aerial System (UAS) safety analysis model, which hereafter is called USAM. The USAM effort proposed herein is an extension of current efforts underway by the UAS community, and it extends these efforts by incorporating UAS scenarios and encounter geometries to populate existing safety analysis models, thereby producing credible future UAS safety metrics
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Anticipated Benefits
USAM will represent a valuable analysis tool that NASA researchers can use to assess the safety component of their proposed future NAS configurations, including future NextGen improvements. We believe that, in the very near future, all safety assessments will have to include a UAS component. The reason that they do not already require a UAS component is that a tool such as USAM does not exist. With the existence of USAM, safety analysis including UAS vehicles will become a possible, and ultimately required, part of all future NextGen analyses. The demand, therefore, by the research community for USAM is expected to be high.
Federal Aviation Adminstration (FAA). The FAA will require a system to methodically compute the probabilities of hull loss, separation violations, collisions, and the risk to the public, before approving any change to the NAS which allows UAS flights. A tool such as USAM plus other extant FAA analysis techniques will be needed to compute such an assessment. Other government and commercial. Any government agency or commercial organization considering using UAS in the civilian airspace for their work—including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, local police departments, UAS manufacturers, UAS users, and so forth—will need a tool like USAM to assess the risk of each mission before flying them. With the information provided by USAM, such agencies can modify their flight plans if necessary or modify the parameters of the mission to ensure that the computed safety probabilities are within tolerable limits. More »
Federal Aviation Adminstration (FAA). The FAA will require a system to methodically compute the probabilities of hull loss, separation violations, collisions, and the risk to the public, before approving any change to the NAS which allows UAS flights. A tool such as USAM plus other extant FAA analysis techniques will be needed to compute such an assessment. Other government and commercial. Any government agency or commercial organization considering using UAS in the civilian airspace for their work—including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, local police departments, UAS manufacturers, UAS users, and so forth—will need a tool like USAM to assess the risk of each mission before flying them. With the information provided by USAM, such agencies can modify their flight plans if necessary or modify the parameters of the mission to ensure that the computed safety probabilities are within tolerable limits. More »
Project Library
Primary U.S. Work Locations and Key Partners
| Organizations Performing Work | Role | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligent Automation, Inc. | Lead Organization | Industry | Rockville, Maryland |
Langley Research Center
(LaRC)
|
Supporting Organization | NASA Center | Hampton, Virginia |
Primary U.S. Work Locations
-
Maryland
-
Virginia
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