Civil Aviation Occurrences in Slovakia and Their Evaluation Using Statistical Methods

Abstract

The nature of a civil aviation occurrence may be defined in three different categories while considering its severity. General categories include civil aviation accidents, serious incidents and incidents. The present article analyses the civil aviation occurrences in Slovakia which happened in the period from 2000 to 2019. In this period, there was a significant increase in the number of civil aviation occurrences, and incidents, in particular, represented the highest percentage. A Pareto analysis was applied to identify the key incident categories (wildlife strike, technical failures of the aviation technology and unauthorised penetration of airspace). A multiple regression analysis and the Poisson regression were used to create two models of correlations between the number of civil aviation occurrences and the selected input variables. Both models are statistically significant, and, based on the AIC (Akaike Information Criterion), the Poisson regression model appeared to be of higher quality. The model showed, for example, that an increase in variables (the number of commercial aircrafts aged over 14 years and the number of total aircraft movements) resulted in a slight increase in the expected number of civil aviation occurrences.