Fleet Level Anomaly Detection of Aviation Safety Data

For our purposes a fleet is defined as a group of aircraft sharing generally compatible parameter lists. Here, in this effort, we aim at developing a system level analysis scheme. In this paper we address the capability for detection of fleetwide anomalies as they occur, which itself is an important initiative toward the safety of the real-world flight operations.

The flight data recorders archive millions of data points with valuable information on flights everyday. The operational parameters consist of both continuous and discrete (binary & categorical) data from several critical subsystems and numerous complex procedures. In this paper, we discuss a system level anomaly detection approach based on the theory of kernel learning to detect potential safety anomalies in a very large data base of commercial aircraft.

We also demonstrate that the proposed approach uncovers some operationally significant events due to environmental, mechanical, and human factors issues in high dimensional, multivariate Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) data. We present the results of our detection algorithms on real FOQA data from a regional carrier.