Sensitivity Analysis for General Aviation Risk Assessment

Abstract

General Aviation structural risk assessment is of vital importance to ensure airworthiness and safety. However, it is even more important to understand the role of all the different variables and their importance or sensitivity over the airplane life in order to reduce the risk. Based on this idea, different sensitivity methods (scatter plots, parallel box plots, and global sensitivity) were applied to the software SMART (Small Aircraft Risk Technology). SMART is probabilistic fatigue linear damage software developed by the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to conduct risk assessment in general aviation (GA) airplanes. SMART computes the airplane structural life considering variables such as: maneuver and gust load limit factors, ground stress, one-g-stress, flight length-velocity matrix, flight length-weight matrix, exceedance curves, Miner’s damage coefficients, and stress life curves, considering randomness in some of the variables. The results from the sensitivity methods indicate that the variables one-g stress, gust and maneuver loads, PSN curve and damage coefficient play an important role in the airplane life and more caution should be focused on these variables.