STRICT PRODUCT LIABILITY AND SAFETY: EVIDENCE FROM THE GENERAL AVIATION MARKET

"This paper examines the impact of a strict product liability standard on the accident rate in the general aviation (GA) industry. Liability expenses increased by 775% between 1976 and 1986, reducing the sales of new GA aircraft by 90% and increasing the age of the GA fleet. Using both aggregate and model-specific data, our results indicate that the increase in the age of the GA fleet increased the accident rate by 25%-35% during 1981-2000. In addition, the higher price of GA aircraft boosted sales of homebuilt planes, which have higher accident and fatality rates than GA aircraft. "("JEL "K13, L62, L15) Copyright (c) 2007 Western Economic Association International.

A Demonstration of Reliability and Certification Standards for Unmanned Aircraft System Control Links

As the desire to integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) more fully into the National Airspace System (NAS), significant concerns regarding safety remain. One concern is the possibility of an air vehicle losing link with the controller and causing harm to people on the ground or aboard other aircraft. Since a data link is not a critical component for manned aircraft, the industry lacks standards for such a system. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how minimum reliability standards for UAS links can be established using a Target Level of Safety (TLS) approach. This approach incorporates factors related to the operating environment. The paper demonstrates the implementation of a model that incorporates event tree analysis using Monte Carlo simulation to predict casualties caused by UAS failures to third-party persons only. The work demonstrates how analyzing a lost link condition as an initiating condition of a system failure, the user can determine minimum system reliability requirements and conduct trade offs between the link failure rate and a mean time to reestablish link, in the event of a failure