Welcome back to the Weekly Aviation Safety Report. Every Monday Robust Analytics reports on safety margins at 26 United States airports. With this Aviation Safety Monitor Weekly Report, Robust Analytics offers the aviation community timely assessments of changing safety margins and safety-related events. Dates and times are tracked in UTC and the week ends at midnight every Saturday. This week’s report includes data through 2400 UTC on May 11, 2024.

For New Readers: Please read our article “Did Safety Degrade in the National Airspace System in the Winter of 2022-2023?” that applies our methods and data  to examine whether safety margins decreased during the events of winter 2022-2023.  

The Aviation Safety Monitor measures safety margins by estimating the frequency, duration, and severity of buffer encroachments. Our paper “How Do We Measure Safety Margins?” provides a detailed description of the methods and data. That can be found here https://www.robust-analytics.com/measure on the Robust Analytics website.

Weekly Safety Margin Update. The steady improvement in safety margins since early March reversed this past week. Total encroachment durations for the 26 airports increased 24.6 percent for the week ending May 11 and are now at the highest level since the week of March 9. Encroachment events also increased by 14 percent over the past week and 22 percent over the past two weeks. These changes can be easily seen in our new Figure 1 that displays weekly summary data for the 26 monitored airports. The Aviation Safety Monitor team will be tracking the daily metrics this week to detect whether this past week was a temporary increase or an indicator of a longer negative trend in safety margins.

Let’s now take a closer look at safety margins for the seven days ending May 11. Figure 2 displays estimates of encroachment durations per aircraft for each hour over the seven days. This offers a detailed look at how safety margins vary over the operating day. Figure 2 also indicates the typical range of the data by showing the 25th, 75th, and 90th percentile values of the duration per aircraft metric. The percentiles are calculated from 14 months of data from May 2022 through June 2023.

Examination of Figure 2 shows that the increase in encroachment durations for this week is due to higher peaks in the hourly data every day from May 5-8. Each of those days had several peak values above the 75th percentile. In contrast, the previous week had only one hour above the 75th percentile during the entire week. Safety margins gradually improved over the last three days of the week. These data reinforce our plan to look for continued improvement in the metrics this week.

Figure 3 shows duration per aircraft for the four weeks from April 14 through May 11, 2024. This chart also shows how encroachment durations increased in the past week driven by higher peaks during the busiest times of the day.

Trends are easier to detect visually with the moving average plats shown in Figure 4. The jump early in the past week is clearly visible, with a return to normal levels during the last two days.

Figure 5 shows a longer perspective with data back to February 18, 2024. This chart clearly shows the reduced safety margins for several days in early March that we reported on in our initial posting on April 8, 2024. That early March period had the highest durations and the longest extended period with high durations in the past two months, with metrics well above the 90th percentile for many hours.

Figure 5. Hourly Encroachment Duration Per Aircraft, February 18 to May 11, 2024

Figure 6 displays the moving average version for the past two months, which highlights the early March increase in encroachment durations for more than a week. This is the only sustained period of more than a couple of days for the past two months.

We wrap-up this week’s report with updates to the two charts presented in the previous weekly reports. Figure 7 shows the total daily counts of the number of encroachments and their durations across the 26 airports in the 17 metropolitan areas that we monitor. The blue bars report estimates of total daily encroachment durations divided by the number of aircraft in the terminal airspace (approximately 50 miles of the airport center) for all 17 terminal airspaces. The red line reports the daily number of encroachment events per 100 aircraft.

As data are added to the chart each week, readers can begin to detect some mild day-of-week variation and, more importantly, periods of a few days and even a week or longer in which encroachment durations increase significantly. In the coming weeks, we will examine these fluctuations in more detail.

How severe are these encroachments? The FAA defines three separation conformance categories based on how far they are from the separation index. (See the description “How Do We Measure Safety Margins?”for details on the conformance categories and how we measure them.) In that classification system, Conformance Categories A and B are the most severe. Under our definition of a buffer encroachment, Category A and B encroachments are counted under all meteorological conditions.

Figure 8 displays information on the most severe separation conformance categories. The daily durations and event counts for the sum of Category A and B encroachments are shown in Figure 7. The pattern differs from the Figure 1, as there is no obvious trend during the time period. This suggests that Category PE and C encroachments are affected by different factors from Category A and B. We will take a deep dive into those differences in a future weekly report.

Overall, at the NAS level safety margins have been stable for the past several weeks. The industry shows evidence of recovering from the stress of September 2022 to February 2023. We will take a deeper dive into that time period and the subsequent partial recovery in future reports.