Evaluation of Aircraft Excursion Risk at Bandaranaike International Airport

Abstract

Flight safety is one of the key priorities in the air transport industry. Considering historical aircraft accidents, majority of the aircraft accident occurred at airports. Among the airport related aircraft accidents, a higher percentage of accidents have taken place during the landing operations. Runway excursions such as overruns and veer-offs are the typical runway related aircraft accidents that frequently occur during aircraft landings. Thus, this paper focuses on aircraft excursion risk at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) where the majority of the international flight movements are currently taking place in Sri Lanka. This paper considers different operational conditions that probably exist at BIA, and accordingly associated excursion risks are estimated. Aircraft airfield design elements such as the runway length, safety areas and the corresponding critical aircraft for the BIA are used for the estimation. Potential overrun and veer-off risks at aircraft landings are mainly focused. The methodology follows a quantitative approach which consists of event probability, location probability and consequent severity estimation steps. Among the potential weather factors, the conditions at which tailwind over 12 knots (6.17 m/s), reduced visibility and rain are the worst contributory factors for the greatest overrun risk. The paper highlights that the airfield design elements can compensate excursion risks that generate due to various spikes of the operational conditions.