<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Smoke can reduce the airport’s visibility and is related to the aviation safety and efficiency. Low visibility has potential safety hazard, such GA-152 crashed in 1997, and thus there is a need to find out the visibility characteristics in airports over Sumatra and Borneo Island caused by 2015 forest fire. This research aims to analyse the spatiotemporal visibility characteristics over airports in Sumatera and Borneo Island using flight rule visibility below minima criteria and hazard probability. The analysis of smoke was characterized using visibility severity index (VSI) that is a function of visibility severity class and its probability level. Spatiotemporal analysis of severity index combined with hotspot and wind numerical weather model indicates that the worst impact visibility occurred in September and October 2015. The lowest visibility was occured over night until afternoon time period. The spread of VSI impact has a tendency to northward and northwestward. The very high VSI levels occurred at airports such: WIJJ (Jambi), WIBB (Pekanbaru), WAGG (Palangkaraya) which were impacted up to 70% of flight operations time with IFR visibility below minima; while the WIOS (Susilo-Sintang), which operates only on VFR, experienced about 92% of VFR visibility below minima at smoke climax period.</p></abstract>

Smoke can reduce the airport’s visibility and is related to the aviation safety and efficiency. Low visibility has potential safety hazard, such GA-152 crashed in 1997, and thus there is a need to find out the visibility characteristics in airports over Sumatra and Borneo Island caused by 2015 forest fire. This research aims to analyse the spatiotemporal visibility characteristics over airports in Sumatera and Borneo Island using flight rule visibility below minima criteria and hazard probability. The analysis of smoke was characterized using visibility severity index (VSI) that is a function of visibility severity class and its probability level. Spatiotemporal analysis of severity index combined with hotspot and wind numerical weather model indicates that the worst impact visibility occurred in September and October 2015. The lowest visibility was occured over night until afternoon time period. The spread of VSI impact has a tendency to northward and northwestward. The very high VSI levels occurred at airports such: WIJJ (Jambi), WIBB (Pekanbaru), WAGG (Palangkaraya) which were impacted up to 70% of flight operations time with IFR visibility below minima; while the WIOS (Susilo-Sintang), which operates only on VFR, experienced about 92% of VFR visibility below minima at smoke climax period.

Spatiotemporal visibility characteristics impacted by forest and land fire over airports in sumatera and borneo Island, Indonesia

Quaestiones Geographicae

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Smoke can reduce the airport’s visibility and is related to the aviation safety and efficiency. Low visibility has potential safety hazard, such GA-152 crashed...

Class	Flight Rule	Minimum Visibility Condition	Scale
H1	VFR (Visual Flight Rule)	More than 4.8 km (>3 SM)	1
H2	SVFR (Special Visual Flight Rule)	3.2–4.8 km (2–3 SM)	2
H3	IFR (Instrument Flight Rule I)	1.6–3.2 km (1–2 SM)	3
H4	LIFR (instrument Flight Rule II)	Less than 1600 m (< 1 SM)	4

Airport Code (ICAO 4 Letter)	Airport Name	Month (2015)	Frequency (Class)				Flight Operation
Airport Code (ICAO 4 Letter)	Airport Name	Month (2015)	H1 (VFR)	H2 (SVFR)	H3 (IFR)	H4 (LIFR)
WIJJ	Sultan Thaha Jambi	October	0.28	3.55	12.50	77.13	IFR & VFR
WIBB	Sultan Syarif Kasim IIPekanbaru	September	0.99	0.99	10.73	71.26	IFR & VFR
WAGG	TjilikRiwutPalangkaraya	October	0.29	1.08	10.71	79.86	IFR & VFR
WIOS	SusiloSintang	September	0.31	1.23	20.00	70.77	VFR

Probability	Explanation	Prob (Scale)
Frequent	occurred frequently, probability more than 0.7	5
Occasional	occurred infrequently, probability is 0.5 s/d 0.7	4
Remote	occurred rarely), probability is 0.1 s/d 0.5	3
Improbable	not known to have occurred, probability 0.01 s/d 0.1	2
Extremely improbable	Impossible to occur, probability less than 0.01	1

Spatiotemporal visibility characteristics impacted by forest and land fire over airports in sumatera and borneo Island, Indonesia

Published Online: Sep 10, 2019

Page range: 5 - 16

Received: Mar 08, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/quageo-2019-0024

© 2019 Heri Ismanto, Hartono Hartono, Muh Aris Marfai, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Fig. 1

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Fig. 4 a

Fig. 4 b

Fig. 4 c

Fig. 4 d

Fig. 4 e

Fig. 4 f

Fig. 5

Visibility below minima criteria for VFR and IFR (Glahn et al. 2015., Rudack, Ghirardelli 2010, FAA 2009, DGCA 2015).

Visibility Class Frequency at very high VSI (Sources: data analysis and Indonesian aerodrome/airport chart legend (INDOAVIS 2013)).

Probability of occurrence (State-Argentina 2016).