Day 20

Today I spent the whole day continuing/wrapping up my literature review before I begin my Powerpoint. I focused on human factors such as distractions in the cockpit, crew training, leading causes of accidents (both commercial and general aviation), and one particularly interesting article that focused on mitigating errors that occur while taxiing. 

Now that I feel I have a solid background of the risk factors involved with flight, I'm going to continue editing the outline that I made that will aid me in writing my Powerpoint. Once I feel that my outline properly conveys my intentions, I will begin writing the Powerpoint. 

Day 19

At the beginning of the day today, I attended the safety meeting where Jesus presented his research. It's interesting to me how precise you have to be with regards to the assumptions that you make when considering a release. Professor Barkan brought up issues such as wind direction and terrain that affect release severity, both things which I had never thought about taking into account, but definitely two pertinent factors.

For the rest of the day, I continued my literature review, focusing on human factors such as pilot age and simple human error. At the end of the day, I read an interesting article (Safety Practices, Training Practices and CRM: A Midpoint Perspective) that introduced the concept of crew resource management (CRM) to me. The author of the article, Daniel Maurino, made several interesting points about the flaws in how we evaluate aviation accidents. He made the analogy that accident investigation is the "postmortem of the system conducted after the point of no return....there is not much that can be done about it, other than organizing a funeral." It's similar to the thought that I have in the back of my head reading these accident reports, "Yes we will be able to identify the causes of this accident, but how much good are we really doing to prevent similar accidents in the future? Do the suggestions that the NTSB make actually help improve safety?

I appreciate his acknowledgement that human error is unavoidable, and he goes on to detail how the accident investigation process is flawed, because it doesn't investigate the "systemic and organizational" issues that lead to these errors. This article will prove extremely useful for my risk mitigation module, as it really opened my eyes to the issues of accident investigations. Most importantly, he makes sincere attempts and suggestions of ways that the training and monitoring ("surveillance" as he calls it) process can be improved to make the aviation world a safer place. 

Tomorrow I will continue my literature review and possibly get started on the Powerpoint. 

Day 18

Today I spent most of the day continuing to read articles, focusing on the human risk factors for aviation accidents such as pilot error, proper training methods from flight instructors, advanced flight control systems vs. conventional systems, and autopilot. 

In the middle of the day, we had a meeting with Xiang where he checked up on the progress of everyone in our group and made suggestions on how to execute our final project. He made particularly helpful suggestions to me with regards to the risk analysis framework, as I can't easily do a qualitative analysis. His discussions with us about risk were particularly interesting because it became very apparent that risk is defined however you want to it to be. It's not something that's a stringent definition, it changes depending on the situation that you're investigating; that's a very interesting concept to me.

Tomorrow I will continue to read articles on these human factors and possibly get started on the Powerpoint presentation.

Day 17

Today I spent a large part of the day continuing to read articles about aircraft safety measures, such as defense mechanisms against MANPADS, autopilot, bad weather mitigation systems (primarily ice), and  other articles discussing the role of human error in accidents.

For the rest of the day, I attended the lunch meeting where Kwan made a presentation on his role in the Thai railway system. The risk group had a short meeting with Kwan where he asked us some questions about our railroad risk calculation project. 

Tomorrow I will continue to read articles on the role of human error in aircraft accidents, and possibly began working on the Powerpoint.

Day 16

Today I spent the first half of the day continuing to read articles about mitigating terrorist threats, as well as an article about preventing runway incursions. Other articles that I read focused on securing cargo, and defending aircraft from missiles. After this, I browsed over the Udemy course again to get an idea of the type of PowerPoint that I am supposed to create. 

With this in mind, I created an outline covering the material that I felt was appropriate for my PowerPoint.  I am in a somewhat unique position given the nature of airplane accidents. I have identified the typical risk factors that affect daily flight. The outline is certainly subject to change. 

Here is the link to the outline, I would appreciate your comments: PowerPoint Outline

Tomorrow I will continue working on my outline and reading articles on efforts to protect aircraft the Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) such as the Northrop Grumman Guardian. 

Day 15

For the beginning of a day I attended the lectures where Chen-Yu, Xiang, and Laura presented on their topics of transportation risk. 

For the rest of the day, I continued to read articles for my aviation project, in the process compiling a document that summarizes all of the articles that I've read. The articles that I read today focused on bird strikes, methods to identify terrorists, and the effectiveness of post 9/11 security measures instituted by the government. 

On Monday I will begin outlining the risk factors and slides for my Powerpoint presentation. The document that summarizes all of the articles that I've read will be particularly helpful in building my outline.

Day 14

Today I spent most of the day reading articles for my aviation project. I focused on articles about mitigating the risks from terrorism, as well as articles that discussed the economic conditions of the post 9/11 flying world. These articles discussed the security efforts administered by the TSA and federal government to create safe flying conditions. I also found some interesting articles about other security measures to prevent terrorism, such as profiling. I attended a short lecture from Deb about the work that his research team has done investigating an Amtrak section of the Northeast Corridor.

Tomorrow, I plan to continue reading articles for my aviation project, as well as attending several of the lectures on the safety meeting organized by Francesco.

Day 13

For the first part of the day, I continued to read articles for my aviation risk project. My focus today was in flight cabin safety, terrorist threats, and runway incursions/safety. I read some very interesting articles on the MANPADS air defense system, the economic costs of terrorist attacks, and runway arrestor systems for planes that overrun their target. Another interesting article discussed the effects of noise cancelling headphones on passenger safety.

For the rest of the day today, I am going to attend the seminars from Professor Tutumeler's research group. Tomorrow I will continue to read articles for my aviation project and possibly begin outlining my Powerpoint presentation. 

Day 12

For most of the day today I listened to presentations by Francesco and Gilles Saussine on balast flight. In the spare time Manu and I made the necessary changes to the ArcGIS presentation before we present it to the company. I looked up articles for my aviation project as well, specifically on runway incursion avoidance systems.

Tomorrow I plan to attend more of the presentations from SNCF and continue reading articles for my aviation project. 

Day 11

Today I continued reading articles about different sources of aviation accidents such as ice accumulation, runway incursions, bird strikes, and pilot/ air traffic control fatigue. This continues to give me a greater background on the different types of hazards that exist within the world of aviation.

In between reading the articles, I've been attending some of the lectures from the SNCF visit. Riley gave an introduction to the research that he does on concrete cross ties as well as the sleeper and fastening system.  Later I will attend more of the lectures from the graduate students, as well as meeting with Rapik and Jesus to discuss the final results of our ArcGIS project.

Day 10

Today I delved into researching different topics of interest for my aviation project. I began with some simple searches with the words "aviation" and "risk" in them, and started reading some articles. After a few common themes became apparent to me, I further refined my search to glean some information on these themes. A couple areas of interest include: 

1. The effects of fatigue on pilots
2. The effects of fatigue on air traffic control
3. Outdated technology and poor infrastructure (runways, traffic management systems, etc.) that pilots and air traffic control rely on
4. The mitigation of risks from terrorist attacks on flights

Throughout next week, I will continue to read articles in these topics, as well as search for new interest topics.

Day 9

For the first part of the day, we worked on putting the finishing touches on our ArcGIS presentation. In our meeting today, Chen-Yu, Xiang, and Laura looked over our presentation and made some suggestions on how to improve it before we ultimately present it to the company. They also talked to us about the project that we will be doing in the coming weeks. This involved them explaining the process of literature review as a research practice. 
After the meeting, we worked on fixing the presentation, which consisted of updating the maps, font sizes, spacing, etc. I continued to look over the ASRS reports to glean some information from them, as well as doing searches through the U of I library to find journal articles about aviation risk. In the short time that I've spent searching through the library, I can already tell that this is going to be a far more valuable resource to learn more about my research interests than Google has been. Tomorrow I plan to continue reading the articles that I found today, as well as finding new pertinent ones.

Day 8

Today I worked on finishing the ArcGIS project with Manu.We worked on creating a Powerpoint presentatons summarizing all of the information and creating the appropriate maps in ArcGIS. We ran into a little bit of difficulty fitting all 11 routes onto one slide, but by resizing some things and shifting others around, we were able to make everything fit. We have been working in tandem with Hannah and Jeff to sync our Powerpoint presentations.
In the spare time that I had today, I continued to do research on risk mitigation in aviation. Rather than focusing on specific accidents, I've started to look more for general techniques that mitigate the risk. I found out about a program called Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which is an anonymous system which allows pilots to confidentially report close calls in an effort to increase safety in the future. This is precisely the type of system that would allow you to introduce reforms that would help mitigate risk in the future. I will continue to read about the ASRS and do more research on this.

Tomorrow, I will continue my research on the ASRS and our group will put the finishing touches on our presentation. 

Day 7

For the first half of the day, I continued researching and reading about different cases of aviation accidents involving hazardous materials. The most rigorous and complete sources in many cases were the NTSB (or equivalent organizations in the incident countries) reports. Transportation risk as it relates to hazardous materials is a pretty undiscovered field. There are several complications that I've come upon in my research. The post-accident investigations inevitably involve much speculation and educated guessing. Due to the nature of these accidents, recovery of data, equipment, etc. is usually impossible or significantly hindered. Thus it is difficult to glean useful information from the investigations. Also, "near-misses" aren't really reported due to concerns about prosecution and punishment. As a result, I'm only reading about worse-case scenarios. This makes it more difficult to learn about effective methods of risk mitigation. Nevertheless, I will move forward with my research in this field, as I have a great deal of interest in aviation.

For the second half of the day after Francesco's lunch meeting, Xiang and Jesus gave us a template and demonstrated how to prepare the final presentations for our ArcGIS project. Manu and I collaborated in splitting up the work. We got a fair amount of it done in the time we have and plan to finish up tomorrow or Thursday. 

Day 6

Today I worked on the next part of the ArcGIS project. In Excel I analyzed the data from the different routes according to the categories that Xiang and Jesus gave us. For each route, we broke down the risk based on type of tank car (Isotainer or Tank-car 1) and based on different ranges of risk levels. All of these calculations allow the data to be more easily interpreted and presentable to a company. It's very satisfying to see the ultimate result of all of the work that we've done. Not surprisingly, for all 6 routes and both types of tank cars,  approximately 75% of the risk fell between 1.0E-04 and 1.0E-06, the middle two levels of risk. This is to be expected; it basically is saying that for most of the route there is not a great deal of risk, but there is a non-negligible amount of risk involved.

After I compared and checked my Excel sheets with Manu, I continued to read more about the ValuJet accident, reading the NTSB accident report on it. After searching through many articles, it's apparent to me that this is the most high profile hazmat accident in aviation history thus far. One recent accident occurred in 2010, when UPS flight #6 crashed. There were a large number of lithium-ion batteries on board the plane, and there were other instances I've read about of lithium batteries catching on fire. This is potentially an area that I can look to further when I do my own project. 

Day 5

This morning I listened to Xiang's P.h.D. defense. It was my first time ever attending a P.h.D. defense, so it was very interesting to see how the process worked. Xiang gave about a 2.5 hour presentation, intertwined with frequent questions from the committee. It looked very exhausting to do, but he definitely knew his subject well and had done his research.
After this I finished checking the ArcGIS project with Manu. All of our data was very close to each other, and we believe that the minisucle error arose from very minor changes that we made to the automatically created routes to make the route pass closer to the cities given to us in the Excel documents. Later, Xiang taught us the steps for our risk calculation as the next step in our ArcGIS project. These calculations will give us an effective method of interpreting all of the data that we've collected from ArcGIS this week. He taught us some more about what exactly risk means and the different terms involved in the calculation process. Next week, I'll complete these risk calculations. For the rest of today, I'm going to read about the ValuJet flight 592 accident.

Day 4

Today Manu and I worked on the closing steps of our ArcGIS project. We exported the data files into Excel and ran them through Matlab. By using Matlab, our data was neatly organized by it's ID numbers and was nicely laid out in Excel. I began the process of comparing my results with Manu, which I will continue tomorrow.
I attended an interesting meeting today where Chen-Yu presented his research on the causes of passenger train derailments and freight train derailments. He created frequency and severity diagrams with his data and drew some conclusions about the similarities and differences in the frequency and severity of these two types of rail transport. It was particularly interesting how he incorporated the very recent findings from the passenger train derailment in Bridgeport, CT. I also learned a lot about the different classifications of derailments and collisions.

Tomorrow, I hope to attend Xiang's PhD defense, and I will finish the ArcGIS project up by comparing my results with Manu. If time permits, I will continue doing research to find a topic that interests me for my aviation risk project. I have already found several interesting articles on the ValuJet crash in the Everglades that was caused by expired chemical oxygen generators of the cargo hold of the plane. 

Day 3

Today I worked on our ArcGIS project the whole time. Manu and I worked on finishing the 6 routes that we were assigned. After I did the process a few more times I became very comfortable with it and it was just a matter of being systematic. Jesus gave us a 45 minute tutorial on the next step of our ArcGIS project, which focused on exporting our data to Excel for presentation to the company

Tomorrow Manu and I will continue working on the ArcGIS project and begin the process of exporting our data to Excel. We are discovering very small differences in our mean for the number of people affected, so we're going to look into the problem and try and discover the source of the error.

Day 2

At the beginning of the day I browsed through the tutorial book for ArcGIS to learn more about this software. I continued to try and install the program on my computer but ran into difficulty. Francesco and I decided that to simply switch to another computer in the office that had ArcGIS already installed on it. Jesus gave us a further tutorial in using ArcGIS, and we got our first assignment; calculating the expected population impact along 6 different train routes.

We had a lunch meeting where Xiang gave a very interesting presentation showing us different statistics on the dangers of broken rails. After the meeting, Manu and I worked on our ArcGIS assignment until the end of the day. I'm much more familiar with this program than I was at the start of the day, and I feel more comfortable using the program. For the rest of the week, we will work on finishing this assignment and I hope to become even more familiar with using ArcGIS.  
 

Day 1

Today was the kickoff meeting for our projects. We learned about the expectations of what the "risk" group would accomplish this summer and a couple of the grad students showed us a case study involving transportation risk, specifically by way of rail. It was interesting learning about the many uses of ArcGIS in solving these transportation issues. I quickly began to realize the real world applications that this field of study can be applied to.

After the meeting we had a tutorial where a couple of the grad students showed us some of the basic features of ArcGIS, introducing the concept of layers, .shp files, and how to sort data by different attributes. I'm currently in the process of trying to install Windows and ArcGIS on my Mac, which has run into some complications. In the meantime, I've scanned through a couple different reference sources and the TRB website to learn more about this field of transportation risk. From the reference sources, it is pretty clear to me that the issue of transportation risk in aviation is relatively unexplored. I look forward to learning more about this topic in the next two months.