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Discovery of Abnormal Flight Patterns in Flight Track Data

Metadata Updated: April 10, 2025

The National Airspace System (NAS) is an ever changing and complex engineering system. As the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is developed, there will be an increased emphasis on safety and operational and environmental efficiency. Current operations in the NAS are monitored using a variety of data sources, including data from flight recorders, radar track data, weather data, and other massive data collection systems. Although numerous technologies exist to monitor the frequency of known but undesirable behaviors in the NAS, there are currently few methods that can analyze the large repositories to discover new and previously unknown events in the NAS. Having a tool to discover events that have implications for safety or incidents of operational importance, increases the awareness of such scenarios in the community and helps to broaden the overall safety of the NAS, whereas only monitoring the frequency of known events can only provide mitigations for already established problems. This paper discusses a novel approach for discovering operationally significant events in the NAS that are currently not monitored and have potential safety and/or efficiency implications using radar-track data. This paper will discuss the discovery algorithm and describe in detail some flights of interest with comments from subject matter experts who are familiar with the operations in the airspace that was studied.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date November 12, 2020
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2025
Data Update Frequency irregular

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date November 12, 2020
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2025
Publisher Dashlink
Maintainer
Identifier DASHLINK_923
Data First Published 2014-09-08
Data Last Modified 2025-03-31
Public Access Level public
Data Update Frequency irregular
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id cfc045bf-62f8-4229-b7ac-26370205662b
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/resources/923/
Program Code 026:029
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 3c24546bfe92a1fd9e3ac5e3bdf28c8f6dd598f0bab9cc8a859a5167ebae392c
Source Schema Version 1.1

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