NASA NTRS2024
Today’s airports are complex multi-faceted ecosystems. Currently, of the 517 certificated airports, 270 are required to use safety management systems (SMSs) to identify and mitigate known hazards and emergent risks and to voluntarily share safety data with commercial operators and tenants. Airports manage a wide variety of hazards. These traffic hubs have direct responsibilities, such as removing foreign object debris from runways and taxiways and configuring runways to help prevent against incursions and tail strikes during takeoff. To ensure safety in the future NAS, the National Academies recommended an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS). An IASMS will employ services, functions, and capabilities (SFCs) to identify and mitigate hazards that are proactively and predictively managed based on data analytics of detected anomalies, precursors, and trends. SFCs would scale with airport complexity and environmental conditions using increasingly automated systems to respond proactively to hazards and, by using integrated data sources and predictive safety analytical methods, discover new, never before seen risks.