Risk Tracker is a terminal airspace safety monitor that delivers up-to-the-minute measurement of hazards, risk precursors, and risk events in terminal areas at 26 airports in the NAS. Updating with current data every minute, Risk Trackerprovides timely insight into safety margin trends and identify increases in risk events. Risk Tracker offers near-term benefits to users by delivering in-time monitoring of risk metrics with alerts for emerging trends.

Risk Tracker monitors airport safety for medium (days before), short term (hours before), and near real time (one minute ago) trends. It can be delivered directly to airlines and operators for timely use in safety analysis, flight planning, operations monitoring decision making, and flight crew/dispatcher training. FAA safety managers can use Risk Tracker to identify “hot spots” and detect evolving safety trends.

Risk Tracker provides real-time answers to important questions that a robust safety monitoring system should ask:

1. What is the current airspace safety status? What hazards and risk events have recently occurred? How do those conditions compare to normal conditions?

2. Has the number of hazards and risk events increased over the past 15 minutes? 30 minutes?  Seven days?

3. Are hazards and risk events becoming more or less frequent? Over what time periods?

4. What are the current and recent hot spots around the NAS?

By delivering timely answers to these and many other questions, Risk Tracker meets an important airline requirement for improved tracking of aircraft exposure to hazards and risk events.

Risk Tracker works independently while complementing the safety margin forecasting capabilities of the SafeFlight forecasting application developed by Robust Analytics under a series of SBIR contracts. Together, Risk Tracker and SafeFlight provide NASA, FAA, and the aviation community with continuous monitoring, alerting, and predictive services for terminal area safety.