Abstract:

To promote the air safety of low and medium altitude general aviation, a safety risk assessment system for low and medium altitude general aviation flight plans was established. Firstly, combined with the regulations and policies, safety factors of general aviation flight plans were investigated to obtain the risk assessment indicators, which included the complexities of flight plans, the completeness of equipment, the sites and heights of obstacles, the conflicts of flights, and personnel and environmental conditions. Secondly, the BWM was utilized to process the evaluation information of indicator importance preference, and thus the weights of risk assessment indicators were determined. Thirdly, a series of risk computation models were developed according to the characteristics of indicators based on flight plan information. Finally, the total risk value was calculated and classified into five risk levels from very low to very high, and the risk assessment system for low and medium altitude general aviation flight plans was developed. The results show that the indicator of pedestrian risk has the biggest weight and the indicator of flight plan complexity risk has the smallest weight by using the proposed method. The indicators with high risk of a general aviation flight plan are the complexity of flight plan, the collision of flights and the dispatch release. The total risk value is 0.088 and the risk level is the lowest level. The flight plan is the optimal choice through comparing the total risk values.

Key words: low and medium altitude general aviation, flight plan, risk assessment, evaluation indicator, best-worst method(BWM)