Quantifying Airspace Risk – Occurrences, Airspace Risk, and Safety Change

At ICAO Air Navigation Conference (AN/CONF-14), held in Montreal, Canada, last September, CANSO co-authored a paper on Moving Beyond Compliance Measurement, dealing in part with the need to ‘develop methodologies and safety performance indicators to assess and monitor risk’.

Airservices Australia, along with the ICAO Separation and Airspace Safety Panel (SASP) and industry colleagues in Zurich have been working towards this goal. They have been adapting SASP methods usually used to define new separation standards to the quantifying the risk for any occurrence, any conflict and for airspace regions. Mathematically based, these consider actual and projected separation, along with time to closest points to find a risk of collision or proximity event. The work also examines typical patterns of trajectories to determine likely hot spots and causes.

This non-technical talk will give an overview of the concepts and show practical examples of how this is applied to conflicts and occurrences, and to a range of airspaces. The focus will be to consider how this work can be extended and used by many ANSPs, and to promote collaboration amongs users.

Session Objectives:
Understand the elements of quantifying airspace risk, and how it can be practically used by ANSPs. Obtain feedback from the audience and explore ways to expand the use along with other ANSPs.