Assessment of the Risk to Ground Population Due to an Unmanned Aircraft In-Flight Failure

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are expected to have an increased presence in the national airspace in the coming years. There have been concerns about the airworthiness of these vehicles versus traditional manned aircraft and the implications for risk to the ground population due to an in-flight system failure. An analytical approach is proposed for the quantitative assessment of the casualty risk of specific UAS operations. This analysis approach uses realistic UAS mission profiles to develop the probability of fatality should a catastrophic failure occur at any point in the flight. This method could be used to conduct trade studies of operational alternatives or be a tool for the safety assessment of a UAS concept of operations. Nomenclature Ncasualties = number of casualties resulting from a catastrophic event Pevent = probability of initiating catastrophic event pimpact = probability of impact of an individual grid cell npopulation = estimated population of an individual grid cell

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