Classification of Flight Situation Based on Risk of Flight Level Loss for Improved Airspace Safety

The safety of air transportation depends on the level of airplane devi-ations from preplanned trajectory and cleared flight level. Minimums of vertical separation are used as perils for safe airplane deviation from required altitude of flight level. Vertical separation minimums are designed to take into account er-rors in pressure altitude measurements. In the paper, we consider airplane flight situation classification based on airplane deviation from cleared flight level. We analyze a full group of classes which include normal flight, high deviation, complicated, emergency, and catastrophic situations. A maximum posterior probability method is used for classification. A Gaussian function is used as a conditional probability density function of each class. A prior probability of each class is estimated by statistical data analysis of historical flight realiza-tions. Proposed classifier could be used in the Flight Management System for safety monitoring and alerting or could be integrated into algorithms of surveil-lance data processing in automatic air traffic control systems.