Fire hazard identification on the flight deck of a short-take-off/vertical-landing type aircraft carrier: fire scenarios selection

The flight deck of aircraft carriers in operation is exposed to fire risks which must be mitigated by fire safety measures such as firefighting and suppression systems. To develop advanced fire safety measures, the quantitative risk assessment and management is essential, where fire hazards must be identified in a probabilistic manner considering operational conditions (e.g. sortie generation rates) and site-specific ocean environmental conditions (e.g. humidity, wave and wind profiles). In this paper, a set of realistic fire scenarios on the flight deck of a hypothetical short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) type aircraft carrier are selected, which shall be used for the quantitative fire risk assessment and management. Potential fire hazards are formulated as a function of random parameters associated with operational and ocean environmental conditions, and probabilistic sampling technique is used to select hundred fire scenarios. Fire exceedance diagrams are established in association with fire-impacted (leak) area through the selected fire scenarios.