As a member of the team responsible for analyzing new flight operation concepts at Boeing, Mike Ulrey needs to be able to develop quantitative models to study the safety of operations and make compelling safety cases to regulators. Mathematica provides him the tools and development environment to do both. "Being able to combine the generation of airplane trajectories with the statistics related to them in such a very small package is amazing."

With Mathematica, he can create 3D models to analyze the effects that several different parameters could have on flight paths and run simulations to generate statistics for various situations. "It puts the whole conversation of whether it's safe on a firm quantitative-model basis that enables people to make decisions about whether to go forward," says Ulrey. "They have much better insight and they have confidence in the results."

Related Links

• Mathematica's Manipulate Command
• Boeing