Global impacts of aircraft emissions on air quality and nitrogen deposition

Global passenger air traffic has doubled in the 13 years prior to 2019, and is expected to double again over the next 20 years or so. Growing demand for aviation is met by a corresponding increase in jet fuel being burned by aircraft, releasing multiple pollutants into the atmosphere. Besides disturbing the Earth’s radiative balance, these...

Radar Sensing in General Aviation: For Purposes of Detect and Avoid

Safety is crucial in aviation. This includes the category of General Aviation, which consists of flights that are not performed by commercial airliners. Many of these vehicles are small in comparison to the aircraft used for commercial transport, providing seats for two or four persons. Despite their limited size, accidents involving General...

Managing startle and surprise in the cockpit

After several recent flight safety events, such as the accident of Air France flight 447 in 2009, investigators determined that surprise and startle can severely disrupt pilot responses. They concluded that pilots need to be better prepared for unexpected and potentially startling situations. In response, aviation safety authorities have...

Ecological Approach to Pilot Situation Awareness

Future air traffic concepts foresee that in unmanaged airspace, to reduce workload of air traffic controllers and the resulting constraints on capacity, the separation task will be delegated to the flight deck. Technology-driven pilot self-separation support systems have been developed that present explicit automated solutions to deal with...

Investigation of Practical Flight Control Systems for Small Aircraft

Personal air transportation utilizing small aircraft is a market that is expected to grow significantly in the near future. However, seventy times more accidents occur in this segment as compared with the commercial aviation sector. The majority of these accidents is related to handling and control problems. In commercial aviation, Fly-By-Wire ...

Safety Management and Risk Modelling in Aviation: The challenge of quantifying management influences

Aviation accidents result from a combination of many different causal factors ( human errors, technical failures, environmental and organisational influences). Increasing interest over the past two decades in causal modelling of organisational factors has been motivated by the desire to understand these fundamental causes and their influences in...

Bayesian Belief Nets and Vines in Aviation Safety and other Applications

Ecological Approach to Pilot Terrain Awareness

The upgrade of the flight deck instruments from electro-mechanical dials and gauges towards computer-driven systems and interfaces was a necessary step to accommodate the increasing demands in flight technical performance and safety. The upgrade was a relatively slow process, however, where new systems were developed and installed as soon as the...

Causal risk models of air transport: Comparison of user needs and model capabilities

Aircraft technology's: Contribution to sustainable development

Aviation brings many advantages to society, reflected in its huge growth figures. But, aviation is also criticized for its many undesired effects. Sustainable Development as a concept is brought forward by many of the actors in the aviation system as a way in which aviation can develop itself in order to reduce its undesired effects. Some actors...

Transport Infrastructure Slot Allocation

In this thesis, transport infrastructure slot allocation has been studied, focusing on selection slot allocation, i.e. on longer-term slot allocation decisions determining the traffic patterns served by infrastructure bottlenecks, rather than timetable-related slot allocation problems. The allocation of infrastructure capacity among carriers is...