Understanding aviation risk

The paper seeks to highlight the challenges facing the aviation industry in the need to better understand and predict operational risk. It looks at the types of data available to improve the understanding of risk and discusses the need to bring it together using a common risk dasiacurrencypsila. The relationships between the different types of data are briefly addressed in regard to both understanding the current level of risk and predicting what it will be in the future. The conclusions are that a more comprehensive view of risk is required and that the fusion of incident based data together with risk exposure data provides a method for achieving this. The paper highlights the potential for future aviation regulation to be risk reduction based. The paper has been generated as a result of effort being undertaken at NATS to understand risk, but reflects it from a whole aviation viewpoint.