Optimized flight safety event detection in the national general aviation flight information database

This work presents a redesign of the National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID) to allow swift ingestion of flight data and calculation of flight safety events, as it is rapidly growing and currently housing over 750,000 hours of flight data. This redesign reduced memory and storage usage by a factor of 5, as well as reducing flight data import and event calculation time from over 3 minutes to 0.3 seconds by using a per-parameter compressed data representation in the database and a new pipelined data ingestion strategy. In addition to this, four new advanced flight safety event calculations were developed for proximity, self-defined glide path deviation, stall and loss of control in flight (LOC-I). A time and location bounded flight matching strategy was used to calculate proximity events for flights in on average 3.2 seconds per flight in the full 660,000 flight database. The stall and LOC-I event calculations show strong improvements upon prior work in the area on both a test flight flown for accurate stall time measurements and a historical sample of data independently annotated by two subject matter experts. The enhancements to the stall and LOC-I event calculations resulted in an increase in stall event detection from 23.1% to 83.1% in the historical data while reducing false negatives by a factor of 3. As the leading cause of aviation accidents worldwide is LOC-I, it is an especially important issue for flight safety monitoring programs, especially as other existing flight data monitoring (FDM) software lacks these new stall, LOC-I and proximity event detection capabilities.