Statistical modelling of runway incursion occurences in the United States

Runway incursions are an important aviation safety concern; between 2002 and 2015 there were 16,785 runway incursions at United States airports ranging in size from small general aviation (GA) to large commercial airline hubs. When examining airports with the 50 highest incursion count over the past 5 years, the predominant categories were large hubs, which accounted for 21 airports and general aviation (GA) airports which accounted for 16 airports. In June 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the Runway Incursion Mitigation (RIM) program to identify airport risk factors that might contribute to a runway incursion and develop strategies to help airport stakeholders mitigate those risks. Different size airports serve different aircraft fleets, serve different operating volumes, and have different resources available (both funds and technologies) for incursion mitigation. Therefore, it is valuable to determine the correlating factors that affect incursions at different size airports. This paper uses econometrics based modelling techniques to identify statistically significant factors in data provided by the (FAA) public web sites on runway incursions. The model identified statistically significant variables that correlate with incursions, based on severity, for airports categories defined by the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS).The model results indicate that operational incidents (OI) are more likely at large hub airports. In contrast, at GA/non-hub airports, pilot deviations (PD) were significant for less severe incursions (severity C and D). Only one variable, “number of years since 2002”, was found to be significant for all the three airport categories; this variable was correlated with severity A incursions and indicated a statistically significant reduction in severity A incursions, despite an overall 80% increase in incursions between 2002 and 2015.