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At least 181 records · Page 10
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2004

'Systemic Failures' and 'Human Error' in Canadian TSB Aviation Reports Between 1996 and 2002

This paper describes the results of an independent analysis of the primary and contributory causes of aviation accidents in Canada between 1996 and 2003. The purpose of the study was to assess the comparative frequency of a range of causal factors in the reporting of these adverse events. Our results suggest that the majority of these high consequence accidents were attributed to human error. A large number of reports also mentioned wider systemic issues, including the managerial and regulatory context of aviation operations. These issues are more likely to appear as contributory rather than primary causes in this set of accident reports.

Holloway, C. M.↗
NASA NTRS2019

A Summary of Results from Technologies for Aircraft State Awareness Safety Enhancement 210 Output 2

In 2014, the Commercial Aviation Safety Team produced a report describing the results of an analysis intended to understand and mitigate airplane incidents and accidents associated with flight crew loss of attitude or energy state awareness. That report described several "Safety Enhancements" including a new category of "Research Safety Enhancements". This paper focuses on Safety Enhancement (SE) 210 Output 2, investigating improvements in design methods and guidelines to "assess flight crew performance in situations associated with loss of energy and/or attitude state awareness".

Feary, Michael S.↗
NASA NTRS2006

The Columbia Debris Loan Program; Examples of Microscopic Analysis

Following the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia NASA formed The Columbia Recovery Office (CRO). The CRO was initially formed at the Johnson Space Center after the conclusion of recovery operations on May 1,2003 and then transferred .to the Kennedy Space Center on October 6,2003 and renamed The Columbia Recovery Office and Preservation. An integral part of the preservation project was the development of a process to loan Columbia debris to qualified researchers and technical educators. The purposes of this program include aiding in the advancement of advanced spacecraft design and flight safety development, the advancement of the study of hypersonic re-entry to enhance ground safety, to train and instruct accident investigators and to establish an enduring legacy for Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew. Along with a summary of the debris loan process examples of microscopic analysis of Columbia debris items will be presented. The first example will be from the reconstruction following the STS- 107 accident and how the Materials and Pro~es~steesa m used microscopic analysis to confirm the accident scenario. Additionally, three examples of microstructural results from the debris loan process from NASA internal, academia and private industry will be presented.

Russell, Rick↗
NASA NTRS1990

STARS - Supportability Trend Analysis and Reporting System for the National Space Transportation System

The concept, implementation, and long-range goals of a Supportability Trend Analysis and Reporting System (STARS) for the National Space Transportation System (NSTS) are discussed. The requirement was established as a direct result of the recommendations of the Rogers Commission investigation of the circumstances of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. STARS outlines the requirements for the supportability-trend data collection, analysis, and reporting requirements that each of the project offices supporting the Space Shuttle are required to provide to the NSTS program office. STARS data give the historic and predictive logistics information necessary for all levels of NSTS management to make safe and cost-effective decisions concerning the smooth flow of Space Shuttle turnaround.

Graham, Leroy J.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Models of Human-Automation Systems: Initial Analysis of the Boeing 737MAX Design

We describe a formal approach to identifying human factors design vulnerabilities and usability concerns in the context of automated control systems. We present an initial analysis of the design of the B737MAX that has suffered two fatal accidents. We highlight two main design vulnerabilities and one usability concern. Key formal generic properties used to identify these vulnerabilities and usability concerns are defined. These generic properties, and others referenced in the paper, can be applied to the analysis of any human-automation system.

HSI↗
NASA NTRS2002

Analysis for the Progressive Failure Response of Textile Composite Fuselage Frames

A part of aviation accident mitigation is a crashworthy airframe structure, and an important measure of merit for a crashworthy structure is the amount of kinetic energy that can be absorbed in the crush of the structure. Prediction of the energy absorbed from finite element analyses requires modeling the progressive failure sequence. Progressive failure modes may include material degradation, fracture and crack growth, and buckling and collapse. The design of crashworthy airframe components will benefit from progressive failure analyses that have been validated by tests. The subject of this research is the development of a progressive failure analysis for a textile composite, circumferential fuselage frame subjected to a quasi-static, crash-type load. The test data for the frame are reported, and these data are used to develop and to validate methods for the progressive failure response.

Johnson, Eric R.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Analysis for the Progressive Failure Response of Textile Composite Fuselage Frames

A part of aviation accident mitigation is a crash worthy airframe structure, and an important measure of merit for a crash worthy structure is the amount of kinetic energy that can be absorbed in the crush of the structure. Prediction of the energy absorbed from finite element analyses requires modeling the progressive failure sequence. Progressive failure modes may include material degradation, fracture and crack growth, and buckling and collapse. The design of crash worthy airframe components will benefit from progressive failure analyses that have been validated by tests. The subject of this research is the development of a progressive failure analysis for textile composite. circumferential fuselage frames subjected to a quasi-static, crash-type load. The test data for these frames are reported, and these data, along with stub column test data, are to be used to develop and to validate methods for the progressive failure response.

Johnson, Eric R.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Preliminary Results Obtained in Integrated Safety Analysis of NASA Aviation Safety Program Technologies

The goal of the NASA Aviation Safety Program (AvSP) is to develop and demonstrate technologies that contribute to a reduction in the aviation fatal accident rate by a factor of 5 by the year 2007 and by a factor of 10 by the year 2022. Integrated safety analysis of day-to-day operations and risks within those operations will provide an understanding of the Aviation Safety Program portfolio. Safety benefits analyses are currently being conducted. Preliminary results for the Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) and Weather Accident Prevention (WxAP) projects of the AvSP have been completed by the Logistics Management Institute under a contract with the NASA Glenn Research Center. These analyses include both a reliability analysis and a computer simulation model. The integrated safety analysis method comprises two principal components: a reliability model and a simulation model. In the reliability model, the results indicate how different technologies and systems will perform in normal, degraded, and failed modes of operation. In the simulation, an operational scenario is modeled. The primary purpose of the SVS project is to improve safety by providing visual-flightlike situation awareness during instrument conditions. The current analyses are an estimate of the benefits of SVS in avoiding controlled flight into terrain. The scenario modeled has an aircraft flying directly toward a terrain feature. When the flight crew determines that the aircraft is headed toward an obstruction, the aircraft executes a level turn at speed. The simulation is ended when the aircraft completes the turn.

Reveley, Mary S.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Materials Analysis: A Key to Unlocking the Mystery of the Columbia Tragedy

Materials analyses of key forensic evidence helped unlock the mystery of the loss of space shuttle Columbia that disintegrated February 1, 2003 while returning from a 16-day research mission. Following an intensive four-month recovery effort by federal, state, and local emergency management and law officials, Columbia debris was collected, catalogued, and reassembled at the Kennedy Space Center. Engineers and scientists from the Materials and Processes (M&P) team formed by NASA supported Columbia reconstruction efforts, provided factual data through analysis, and conducted experiments to validate the root cause of the accident. Fracture surfaces and thermal effects of selected airframe debris were assessed, and process flows for both nondestructive and destructive sampling and evaluation of debris were developed. The team also assessed left hand (LH) airframe components that were believed to be associated with a structural breach of Columbia. Analytical data collected by the M&P team showed that a significant thermal event occurred at the left wing leading edge in the proximity of LH reinforced carbon carbon (RCC) panels 8 and 9. The analysis also showed exposure to temperatures in excess of 1,649 C, which would severely degrade the support structure, tiles, and RCC panel materials. The integrated failure analysis of wing leading edge debris and deposits strongly supported the hypothesis that a breach occurred at LH RCC panel 8.

Mayeaux, Brian M.↗
NASA NTRS1997

Fourth NASA Langley Formal Methods Workshop

This publication consists of papers presented at NASA Langley Research Center's fourth workshop on the application of formal methods to the design and verification of life-critical systems. Topic considered include: Proving properties of accident; modeling and validating SAFER in VDM-SL; requirement analysis of real-time control systems using PVS; a tabular language for system design; automated deductive verification of parallel systems. Also included is a fundamental hardware design in PVS.

Holloway, C. Michael↗
NASA NTRS2014

Solid Rocket Launch Vehicle Explosion Environments

Empirical explosion data from full scale solid rocket launch vehicle accidents and tests were collected from all available literature from the 1950s to the present. In general data included peak blast overpressure, blast impulse, fragment size, fragment speed, and fragment dispersion. Most propellants were 1.1 explosives but a few were 1.3. Oftentimes the data from a single accident was disjointed and/or missing key aspects. Despite this fact, once the data as a whole was digitized, categorized, and plotted clear trends appeared. Particular emphasis was placed on tests or accidents that would be applicable to scenarios from which a crew might need to escape. Therefore, such tests where a large quantity of high explosive was used to initiate the solid rocket explosion were differentiated. Also, high speed ground impacts or tests used to simulate such were also culled. It was found that the explosions from all accidents and applicable tests could be described using only the pressurized gas energy stored in the chamber at the time of failure. Additionally, fragmentation trends were produced. Only one accident mentioned the elusive "small" propellant fragments, but upon further analysis it was found that these were most likely produced as secondary fragments when larger primary fragments impacted the ground. Finally, a brief discussion of how this data is used in a new launch vehicle explosion model for improving crew/payload survival is presented.

Richardson, E. H.↗
NASA NTRS2023

SafeAeroBERT: Towards a Safety-Informed Aerospace-Specific Language Model

As aviation systems continue to operate with high traffic, large amounts of documents containing safety-relevant data continue to be generated via reporting systems such as the ASRS. Advanced natural language processing techniques, specifically pre-trained language models, have shown great success in domain-specific applications; however, the text in aviation safety reports is inundated with jargon and thus not fully utilized by general pre-trained models. In this research, we work towards developing a safety-informed aerospace-specific language model by pre-training a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) model on reports from the Aviation Safety Reporting System and the National Transportation Safety Board. The resulting model, called SafeAeroBERT, is fine-tuned for the specific task of document classification, and can be further tuned for named-entity recognition, relation detection, information retrieval, and summarization. Results from the classification task are compared between SafeAeroBERT, the base BERT, and SciBERT models and show SafeAeroBERT outperforms the general BERT and SciBERT on classifying reports about human factors, aircraft, and procedure. SafeAeroBERT can be used on custom tasks, not limited to document classification, and is intended to aid an intelligent knowledge manager for safety report repositories.

Aviation↗
NASA NTRS2002

Preliminary Integrated Safety Analysis of Synthetic Vision Conducted

The goal of the NASA Aviation Safety Program is to develop and demonstrate technologies that could help reduce the aviation fatal accident rate by a factor of 5 by the year 2007 and by a factor of 10 by the year 2022. Integrated safety analysis of day-to-day operations and risks within those operations will provide an understanding of the Aviation Safety Program portfolio beyond what is now available. Synthetic vision is the first of the Aviation Safety Program technologies that has been analyzed by the Logistics Management Institute under a contract with the NASA Glenn Research Center. These synthetic vision analyses include both a reliability analysis and a computer simulation model.

Reveley, Mary S.↗
NASA NTRS1990

A parametric shell analysis of the shuttle 51-L SRB AFT field joint

Following the Shuttle 51-L accident, an investigation was conducted to determine the cause of the failure. Investigators at the Langley Research Center focused attention on the structural behavior of the field joints with O-ring seals in the steel solid rocket booster (SRB) cases. The shell-of-revolution computer program BOSOR4 was used to model the aft field joint of the solid rocket booster case. The shell model consisted of the SRB wall and joint geometry present during the Shuttle 51-L flight. A parametric study of the joint was performed on the geometry, including joint clearances, contact between the joint components, and on the loads, induced and applied. In addition combinations of geometry and loads were evaluated. The analytical results from the parametric study showed that contact between the joint components was a primary contributor to allowing hot gases to blow by the O-rings. Based upon understanding the original joint behavior, various proposed joint modifications are shown and analyzed in order to provide additional insight and information. Finally, experimental results from a hydro-static pressurization of a test rocket booster case to study joint motion are presented and verified analytically.

Davis, Randall C.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Test and Analysis Correlation of Form Impact onto Space Shuttle Wing Leading Edge RCC Panel 8

Soon after the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) began their study of the space shuttle Columbia accident, "physics-based" analyses using LS-DYNA were applied to characterize the expected damage to the Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) leading edge from high-speed foam impacts. Forensic evidence quickly led CAIB investigators to concentrate on the left wing leading edge RCC panels. This paper will concentrate on the test of the left-wing RCC panel 8 conducted at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the correlation with an LS-DYNA analysis. The successful correlation of the LS-DYNA model has resulted in the use of LS-DYNA as a predictive tool for characterizing the threshold of damage for impacts of various debris such as foam, ice, and ablators onto the RCC leading edge for shuttle return-to-flight.

Fasanella, Edwin L.↗
NASA NTRS1976

Individual differences in pilot performance

Selected literature on individual differences in pilot performance is reviewed in order to indicate a possible direction for research. Approaches to studying pilot decision-making processes are discussed, with emphasis given to the wrong-model approach in which accident and incident data, or 'process tracing' provide experimental computational structures. Analysis of data from a simulator experiment on V/STOL zero-visibility landing performance suggests that the order of ranking of individual pilot's effectiveness varies with particular situations defined by combinations of tracking requirements (e.g., glide slope, localizer) and glide-slope segment, or speed requirements; the data are being further analyzed.

Murphy, M. R.↗
NASA NTRS2015

Differences in Characteristics of Aviation Accidents During 1993-2012 Based on Aircraft Type

Civilian aircraft are available in a variety of sizes, engine types, construction materials and instrumentation complexity. For the analysis reported here, eleven aircraft categories were developed based mostly on aircraft size and engine type, and these categories were applied to twenty consecutive years of civil aviation accidents. Differences in various factors were examined among these aircraft types, including accident severity, pilot characteristics and accident occurrence categories. In general, regional jets and very light sport aircraft had the lowest rates of adverse outcomes (injuries, fatal accidents, aircraft destruction, major accidents), while aircraft with twin (piston) engines or with a single (piston) engine and retractable landing gear carried the highest incidence of adverse outcomes. The accident categories of abnormal runway contact, runway excursions and non-powerplant system/component failures occur frequently within all but two or three aircraft types. In contrast, ground collisions, loss of control - on ground/water and powerplant system/component failure occur frequently within only one or two aircraft types. Although accidents in larger aircraft tend to have less severe outcomes, adverse outcome rates also differ among accident categories. It may be that the type of accident has as much or more influence on the outcome as the type of aircraft.

Evans, Joni K.↗