Summary
Airspace encounter models, covering close encounter situations that may occur after standard separation assurance has been lost, are a critical component in the safety assessment of aviation procedures and collision avoidance systems. Of particular relevance to Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) is the potential for encountering general aviation aircraft that are flying under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and are not in contact with air traffic control. In response to the need to develop a model of these types of encounters, Lincoln Laboratory undertook an extensive data collection and modeling effort involving more than 96,000 unconventional aircraft tracks. The outcome of this effort was nine individual models encompassing ultralights, gliders, balloons, and airships. The models use Bayesian networks to represent relationships between dynamic variables and to construct random trajectories that are statistically similar to those observed in the data. The intruder trajectories can be used in fast-time Monte Carlo simulations to estimate collision risk. The model described in this report is one of three developed by Lincoln Laboratory. A correlated encounter model has been developed to represent situations in which it is likely that there would b e air traffic control intervention prior to a close enounter. The correlated model applies to encounters involving aircraft receiving Air Traffic Control (ATC) services and with transponders. TAn encounter with an intruder that does not have a transponder is uncorrelated in the sense that it is unlikely that there would be prior intervention by air traffic control. The uncorrelated model described in this report is based on global databases of pilot-submitted track data. This work is a follow-on to an uncorrelated conventional model developed from recorded radar tracks from aircraft using a 1200 transponder code. A byproduct of this encounter modeling effort was the extraction of feature distributions for unconventional aircraft. This provides an extensive collection of unconventional aircraft behavior in the airspace.