Visualizing Pilot Medical Risk for Executive Awareness

The Office of Aerospace Medicine (AAM) conducts quarterly safety assurance intelligence briefings to evaluate trends in pilot incapacitation, non-fatal accidents, and fatal aviation incidents. These briefings aim to assess the effectiveness of pilot medical oversight and identify medically related risk factors that may be overrepresented in safety events. However, despite access to rich data sources—including FAA’s Document Imaging Workflow System (DIWS), NTSB reports, toxicology findings, MarketScan health data, and special issuance records—the presentation of these data has not effectively supported high-level decision-making. Traditional formats such as static charts and tabular reports fail to offer the clarity and cognitive immediacy needed by senior FAA leaders, limiting their ability to make timely, risk-informed decisions. To address this challenge, AAM proposes adapting “patterns of life” data visualization techniques—originally developed in military and intelligence domains—to aviation medical oversight. These methods can dynamically represent high-dimensional, time and location-linked datasets, revealing hidden patterns, emerging risks, and operational outliers. The research will investigate which military- or commercially derived visualization approaches are most effective for depicting longitudinal trends in pilot medical risk, how to design these visuals for interpretability by non-technical executive audiences, and how best to contextualize comparative risk between pilot subgroups and the general population. It will also explore strategies for fusing disparate data streams into a unified dashboard—integrating sources such as DIWS, MarketScan, toxicology reports, NTSB findings, and AME characteristics—and examine the potential for embedded alerting mechanisms (e.g., risk thresholds, anomaly detection) to support proactive policy intervention. Ultimately, this research seeks to transform how pilot medical risk is synthesized, communicated, and acted upon at the executive level. By enabling more intuitive and actionable insights, the visualization system will empower AAM’s Safety Council to better prioritize emerging threats, direct targeted oversight, and evolve the FAA’s approach from retrospective reporting toward predictive, data-informed safety management

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $49,570.00
• Contract Numbers:

  A11J.AM.81

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Federal Aviation Administration

  800 Independence Avenue, SW
  Washington, DC  United States  20591
• Managing Organizations:

  Civil Aerospace Medical Institute-Federal Aviation Administration

  P.O. Box 25082
  Oklahoma City, OK  United States  73125
• Performing Organizations:

  Federal Aviation Administration

  Aerospace Medical Research and Safety Assurance Division
  6500 S. MacArthur Blvd
  Oklahoma City, OK  United States  73169
• Principal Investigators:

  Nicholson, Scott

• Start Date: 20260105
• Expected Completion Date: 20260406
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: Aeromedical Research
• Subprogram: aviation safety

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Aviation safety; Certification; Risk management; Safety analysis
• Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Aviation; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01979235
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Federal Aviation Administration
• Contract Numbers: A11J.AM.81
• Files: RIP, USDOT
• Created Date: Feb 9 2026 5:03PM