Description: The National Airspace System (NAS) in the United States will become a complex array of commercial and general aviation aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, reusable launch vehicles, rotorcraft, airports, air traffic control, weather services, and maintenance operations, among others. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) projects that by 2025 air traffic will increase by more than 50 percent with 1.1 billion passengers a year and more than 85,000 flights every 24 hours contributing to further delays and congestion in the sky. This increased system complexity necessitates the application of systematic safety risk analysis methods to understand and eliminate where possible, reduce, and/or mitigate risk factors. The product of this effort is the development of an Uninhabited Aerial System (UAS) safety analysis model (USAM). USAM is ground-breaking technology that combines research NASA has already conducted on future UAS flights and UAS performance profiles with technologies developed specifically for UAS flight risk analysis and NAS-wide simulation analysis. The combination of these technologies answers this important question by leveraging on existing work in creative ways and adapting it to the needs of the UAS aviation safety community.

Benefits: USAM will represent a valuable analysis tool that NASA researchers can use to assess the safety component of their proposed future NAS configurations, including future NextGen improvements. We believe that, in the very near future, all safety assessments will have to include a UAS component. The reason that they do not already require a UAS component is that a tool such as USAM does not exist. With the existence of USAM, safety analysis including UAS vehicles will become a possible, and ultimately required, part of all future NextGen analyses.

The non-NASA commercial applications include analyses by FAA and private research organizations. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA will require a system to methodically compute the probabilities of separation violations, collisions, and the risk to the public, before approving any change to the NAS which allows UAS flights. Other government and commercial. Any government agency or commercial organization considering using UAS in the civilian airspace for their work—including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, local police departments, UAS manufacturers, UAS users, and so forth—will need a tool like USAM to assess the risk of each mission before flying them. With the information provided by USAM, such agencies can modify their flight plans if necessary or modify the parameters of the mission to ensure that the computed safety probabilities are within tolerable limits. UAS aircraft manufacturers. UAS aircraft manufacturers can configure USAM with a performance model of their proposed aircraft, run their aircraft in the virtual world with piloted and other UAS aircraft, and quantify the collision risk probability and the top hazards that lead to a collision. With this information, the manufacturer can continue with its production process, if the hazard probability is low enough, or re-engineer the vehicle to remove hazards that are deemed too risky.