Benchmarking airports with specific safety performance measures

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Benchmarking airports with specific safety performance measures

MacLean, Leonard / Richman, Alex / MacLean, Stuart

Highlights • Develops safety performance measures and tests them on data for air traffic failure events. • Captures the features of failures with: rate, mean severity, severity exceedance. • The safety of airport traffic management is compared against benchmarks over time. • The safety measures are consistent with stochastic dominance. • The safety measures show airports with significant performance gaps.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to develop safety performance measures and test the measures on data for air traffic management failure events. Failure events are classified by the severity of the consequence of occurrence, resulting in the rate of occurrence in severity categories. The safety measures are standard statistics calculated from this “distribution” for comparison of airport operations by stochastic ordering. For comparisons a benchmark is developed from the aggregation of failure data on a set of comparable airports. Airport performance is then compared with the benchmark using the defined safety measures. The benchmark comparison was implemented with failure data for major airports in Canada from 2005 to 2012. The results show a number of patterns and anomalies and some airports perform poorly in comparison to a class of similar operations. We conclude by suggesting benchmarking safety measures as a natural addition to the information system on aviation safety compiled by a national regulatory body to unravel anomalies such as implementation problems of a safety management system.