Discovery of Abnormal Flight Patterns in Flight Track Data

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.

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