The effect of geomagnetic storms on aircraft accidents between the years 1919–2023 in civil aviation

Abstract

Detailed research on the effect of geomagnetic storms (GSs) on air crash investigations, which is a very important space weather event and could be the main reason for most aircraft accidents, especially unexplained accidents, has not been done by this time. In this study, we investigated the effect of GSs depending on seasonal changes, solar activity, and geomagnetic activity (GA) over 115 years of aircraft accidents from the decreasing phase of the Solar Cycle (SC) 15 to the increasing phase of SC 25. In our analysis, the accident rates of 1959 air crash events correspond to 68 %, 22 %, 8 %, and 2 % due to mechanical and pilotage reasons, unknown reasons, bad weather conditions, and turbulence that might be related to GSs are obtained for latitudes between ± 10⁰ ≤ φ ≤ ±90⁰ in the northern and southern hemispheres. The MATLAB R2018a Programming Language is used to determine and draw all data in our statistical analyses. Nevertheless, we reconstructed the GA indices such as Dst, Kp, Ap, aa, and am for 1919–2023 by using the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) Forecasting Model for years without observations and therefore missing data. The first important result is that the number of aircraft accidents increased in the decreasing phases of solar activity cycles (SACs) depending on the effective structure of the coronal holes rather than increasing phases. The second important result is that the highest number of accidents occurred in the equinoxes in March and September (and mostly at the beginning of October) while the lower number of accidents was seen in the solstices such as June and December. The third important result is that the rate of accidents depends on how many storms were seen in the decreasing phase of SACs. The SC maximum intensity value that reaches the higher number, or even the duration of the SC will not affect aircraft accidents directly. The GA indices do not follow a regular pattern according to the SC shows that we should look at the geomagnetic structure of the intensity of three elements of a magnetic field of Earth as D (Declination), H (Horizontal), and z (Vertical), and therefore their intensities.