CurveCluster: Automated Recognition of Hard Landing Patterns Based on QAR Curve Clustering

Abstract

Flight safety is of vital importance to the aviation industry. As one of the most typical security events, hard landing is extremely concerned by airlines and related studies have received extensive attention in recent years. However, existing regression or risk based models either suffers from low prediction accuracy, or cannot provide good interpretability, making themselves impractical in real applications. To solve these problems, in this paper we propose CurveCluster: a curve clustering-based approach which is able to automatically recognize hard landing patterns from quick access recorder (QAR) data. We first provide a two-level hierarchical classification of hard landing events based on different hard landing patterns. Then we extract curve features from several key QAR parameters through interpolation and resampling. Finally, we apply K-means clustering algorithm on the curve features to automatically recognize the hard landing patterns. We test our approach on a dataset of 9,203 A320 flight QAR data samples and the overall recognition accuracy reaches up to 93.1%. Moreover, our results directly reflect the reasons of different types of hard landing events, which show strong interpretability.