Expert-Based Risk Assessment for Flight Safety Using Kendall's W and Pearson's Chi-Square

This paper presents a practical method for quantitative assessment of flight safety risk based on expert evaluation and statistical analysis. The approach addresses one of the key challenges in civil aviation: monitoring and managing safety performance under conditions of uncertainty and numerous interrelated risk factors. The proposed model integrates expert judgments with quantitative indicators to evaluate and rank potential hazards affecting flight operations. Using Kendall's coefficient of concordance (W) and the Pearson chi-square test, the method assesses the degree of agreement among experts and determines the statistical significance of identified risk factors. A numerical example demonstrates the application of the model, showing how it can reveal the most influential contributors to flight risk – particularly human and psychological factors – even when overall expert agreement is low. The results highlight that, despite limited consensus, such analysis allows safety managers to identify and prioritize critical factors within the Flight Safety Management System (SMS). The proposed method is simple, computationally accessible, and well suited for rapid evaluation in operational environments where timely decisions are essential. It complements existing risk-based systems such as FORAS by offering a structured, expert-driven framework for monitoring, comparing, and improving flight safety performance.