The Use of Expert Judgement Methods for Deriving Accident Probabilities in Aviation

Improving safety has always been the top interest in the aviation industry. The outcomes of safety and risk analyses have become much more thorough and sophisticated. They have become an industry standard of safety investigations in many airlines nowadays. In the past, airlines were much more limited in answering the questions about hazardous situations, accident probabilities, and accident rates. Airlines try hard to cope with stricter safety standards. The objective of this paper is to find out and quantify the extent of the expert judgment in helping airlines in the evaluation of the Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) events. On top of that, the paper reveals the method for a careful choice of experts, so that their estimations will maximize the potential of an accurate and useful outcome. Also, the paper provides details of implementation of the classical model into this research, then continues with the calculations and visualization of the outcomes. The outcomes are probability distributions per each aircraft type, then per IATA accident type and finally per FDM event.