Systemic approach to determining the safety of sustainable development of air transport: indicators, level, threats

Abstract

The article is dedicated to methods of integrating the safety of air transport in the mechanism of interaction between sustainable development goals and strategic management of sustanable development security through managerial, functional, and informational links between subsytems of sustainable development and different hierarchal levels of safety. This determines the place and role of aviation safety in ensuring fundamental national interests, i.e. sustainable development of national economy. The multifactor hierarchal model detailing the level of safety of air transport was developed in accordance with the system approach in the context of sustainable development and combines the economic and technological, social, and environmental components. It is proposed to consider a total of 7 components and 29 indicators that include shadow economy aspects, without which the current conditions cannot be estimated accurately. The boundaries of safe existence have been defined for all indicators using Student’s t-test. The conducted modelling has determined the current values of all indicators and the safety level of air transport as a whole. Identification has been carried out in accordance with the latest assessment methodology, including the multiplicative integral indices, modified method of normalization and formalized determination of dynamic weights. The list of threats and their severity have been determined using two criteria. Distance from the point of sustainable development, i.e. average value of the «homeostatic plateau», was used to identify the list and importance of threats, while the severity of threats was calculated using elasticity coefficients. The calculations show that the safety of air transport depends foremost on the social component, as well as economic and technological development of aviation.