A Textual Analysis of Dangerous Goods Incidents on Aircraft

Abstract

One often hears of the dangers of transporting lithium batteries by air, but there are many other potentially dangerous goods (DG) that are transported on aircraft, both cargo and passenger. If not properly packaged and handled these dangerous goods can be a risk to passengers and crew or to overall flight safety and have led to the loss of life and aircraft in the past. The purpose of this study was to examine the types of dangerous goods (DG) incidents on aircraft as reported to the U.S. Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) database from January 2010 to January 2020. This research was conducted using the SAS Text Miner software package. The Text Miner software provides an understanding of how the narrative text of data relates to each other. The software summarizes and classifies the text to discover themes and concepts within the data. The SAS Text Miner uncovered five major topics based upon Singular Value Decomposition Analysis which reveals the source of variation between analyzed documents using word clusters that may be viewed as topics.