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.