The attention to airport safety-related issues has grown fast in recent decades. The experience gained in these themes reveals the importance of assessing and mitigating the accident risk in the airport context. This research project intends to define a quantitative risk assessment method useful to calculate the current level of risk for different runway codes and types of movement. As all risk models, also this one will be composed of two sub-models:
1) a cumulative probability distribution model which describes the final position of an aircraft after a veer-off;
2) a damage model, which considers statistical mechanical damages and injuries.
International database will be observed to collect data on the final position of the aircrafts after a veer-off accident.
Geotechnical and geometrical characteristics of the Cleared and Graded Area (CGA) width play a fundamental role in reducing veer-off risk. Therefore, an enlargement of CGA could be an effective strategy for safety in airports: the new method allows the verification and the design of the safety area around the runway.
Existing methods available in the literature provide an estimate of risk, but they consider the system airplane-airport overlooking the human effects. Many researchers elaborated interesting probability and damage models applied to runway accidents. However, they do not consider the people on board, and their concept of veer-off is strictly related to the collision of the airplane with an object, and to the consequence on the infrastructure. However, some studies on the lateral excursions demonstrate a veer-off could be catastrophic even when an obstacle is absent, and the airplane ends its run within the strip. Indeed, not only physical obstacles interfere with the veering off aircraft, but the pilot-weather-airplane-airport system. Moreover, most of the methods proposed in the literature to evaluate the risk do not allow the quantification of the risk. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) introduced safety performance indicators (i.e. fatal accident per 100,000 departures, accident per one million passenger miles, fatalities per 100 million persons on board) which need a synthesis to carry out comprehensive analyses.