Eugene Pik

What I do now

Two things, and they feed each other. As a consultant I help small aviation companies answer the security questions that authorities, investors and customers ask: readiness assessments against NIST CSF 2.0, ISO/IEC 27001 or EASA Part-IS; threat models and security requirements that line up with DO-326A/ED-202A for aircraft under certification; incident response plans and tabletop exercises; and role-based training. As a researcher I measure what actually happens to GNSS and ADS-B in the real world, at the scale of hundreds of billions of surveillance messages, and I turn that into exposure analyses for the routes and regions a client flies.

I work alone, on fixed-scope engagements or a part-time retainer, with no junior hand-offs. You get the person whose name is on the papers.

Research

My research asks a plain question: how much can the aviation system trust the position, velocity and identity data it receives from aircraft, and what does it look like when that trust is misplaced? The answers come from measurement rather than from threat catalogues. Across the published work I have analyzed 376.9 billion ADS-B messages from the OpenSky Network, and the 2025 GET-25 benchmark adds another 246.7 billion, covering 77.5 million flight hours across 260 Flight Information Regions.

• ADS-B integrity degradation: anomalies cluster in time, last far longer than tracker tolerances, and recur across days; monitoring needs to become predictive. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2026.113534.
• GPS anomalies in aviation: 53,232 GPS gaps and 5.9 million position deviations in 376.9 billion messages, correlated with NOTAMs. Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, 2025.
• GNSS anomalies as a signal of geopolitical instability. Journal of Transportation Security, 2025.
• Unmanned aircraft accidents: NTSB reports classified with a large language model. International Journal of AI for Materials and Design, 2025, with an interactive map.
• Global UAS regulation, with Christian Janke and Maarten Uijt de Haag. IEEE ICNS, 2025.
• GET-25: the Global Envelope Thresholding framework and an open benchmark of traffic-normalized kinematic integrity, with João S. D. Garcia and Timothy A. Smith, 2026 (under review).

All of it is on the Research page with abstracts, DOIs and full-text PDFs, and the data and code are on the datasets page. My doctoral research at the University of Essex, in Data Science, began in July 2026 and continues this line: kinematic integrity and security in automated aviation systems.

Publications

Every paper and competition entry, newest first, with its DOI and the full text wherever the publisher allows it. Abstracts are on the Research page.

1. Degradation of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast integrity: Temporal clustering and anomaly persistence. Eugene Pik. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 2026. DOI · PDF
2. Predicting geopolitical instability through GNSS anomalies and air traffic data. Eugene Pik, João S. D. Garcia, Timothy A. Smith, Ibrahim Kocaman, Matthew Berra. Journal of Transportation Security, 2025. DOI · PDF
3. GPS Anomalies in Aviation: Preliminary Insights from Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast Data. Eugene Pik, Matthew Berra, Jeff Yearwood, João S. D. Garcia. Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, 2025. DOI · PDF
4. Utilizing artificial intelligence for National Transportation Safety Board unmanned aerial vehicle accident analysis and categorization. Eugene Pik, João S. D. Garcia. International Journal of AI for Materials and Design, 2025. DOI · PDF
5. Development of global regulations for Uncrewed Aircraft Systems – Europe and beyond: a continued survey and evaluation of progress. Christian Janke, Maarten Uijt de Haag, Eugene Pik. IEEE ICNS 2025. DOI · PDF
6. Global Traffic-Normalized Baseline for ADS-B Kinematic Integrity and Ghost Records. Eugene Pik, João S. D. Garcia, Timothy A. Smith. Manuscript submitted to the Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, 2026. Preprint · PDF
7. Detecting GPS Anomalies in Aviation Using ADS-B: Correlating Coordinate Gaps and GPS Deviations with NOTAM Warnings. Eugene Pik, Matthew Berra, Jeff Yearwood, João S. D. Garcia. AIAA AVIATION Forum and ASCEND 2024. DOI · PDF
8. Empirical Propeller Mass Sizing for Small-Scale Aircraft. Amy Chang, Eugene Pik, Robert W. Deters, Or D. Dantsker. AIAA AVIATION Forum and ASCEND 2024. DOI · PDF
9. Airport security: the impact of AI on safety, efficiency, and the passenger experience. Eugene Pik. Journal of Transportation Security, 2024. DOI · PDF
10. The Pilot Shortage: Implications, Repercussions, and Tried Solutions. Eugene Pik. Journal of Air Transport Studies, 2022. DOI · PDF
11. General Aviation Aircraft as a Meteorological Sensor. Eugene Pik, Amy Woolsey, Jude Luciano. Entry to the ICAO innovation competition 2023. Record and files
12. Enhancing Hurricane Forecasting and Alerts through AI-Driven Analysis of General Aviation Data. Eugene Pik, Amy Woolsey, Jude Luciano, Natanel Solomonov, Maria Wright. Entry to the NASA Gateways to Blue Skies Competition 2024. Record and files

Uniqopter: designing an air ambulance from the patient outwards

Before Mevocopter Aerospace I founded Uniqopter to develop an eVTOL aircraft, and brought in two people whose experience I lacked: Richard Abbott, an aerospace engineer, and Taras Lyssenko, who works in business development and government relations. Together we produced a conceptual design for a hybrid eVTOL that takes the characteristics of a Part 27 helicopter and adapts them for medical use.

The design came out of interviews with air ambulance operators across Canada and the United States. They described the same problem in different words: their aircraft are general-purpose helicopters retrofitted with medical equipment, so the cabin, the access, the power and the vibration environment all fight the clinical work rather than supporting it. We designed for the patient and the crew first and let the airframe follow.

We also intended to publish the blueprints, designs and procedures as open source, which nobody in aviation had tried. We finished the conceptual design and then put the project on hold, because the regulations, the vertiport infrastructure and battery energy density were all short of what the aircraft needed. The intention is to restart when the market has answered those questions.

Three things from that work carry directly into what I do now: what a certification authority actually asks for, how a safety-critical aircraft programme is put together, and why the security of the systems an aircraft depends on cannot be an afterthought added at the end.

Milestones

• 2026Doctoral research at the University of Essex; RESS paper acceptedBegan Ph.D. research in Data Science in July 2026, on kinematic integrity and security in automated aviation systems. Sole-author study of ADS-B integrity degradation across 229 billion state vectors accepted by Reliability Engineering & System Safety. Featured in Embry-Riddle Worldwide’s alumni spotlight.
• 2025Three journal papers and a conference paperJAIS, Journal of Transportation Security, IJAMD and IEEE ICNS; GET-25 benchmark released as open data.
• 2024M.Sc., Embry-Riddle; first author at AIAA AVIATION Forum, Las VegasPresented “Detecting GPS anomalies in aviation using ADS-B”; co-author of a propeller mass-sizing paper; research poster at Embry-Riddle’s Discovery Day in April; sole-author paper on AI in airport security in the Journal of Transportation Security; organized a team for NASA’s 2024 student competition on hurricane forecasting from general-aviation data.
• 2023ICAO innovation competitionOrganized and managed a team proposing general-aviation aircraft as meteorological sensors through ADS-B Version 3. Both competition entries are archived on Zenodo.
• 2022Mevocopter Aerospace foundedFederally incorporated; based in Ontario, Canada. Sole-author paper on the pilot shortage in the Journal of Air Transport Studies.
• EarlierUniqopter eVTOL air ambulance concept; medical-device regulatory consulting; network security and teaching in Israel; robotics studies in Minsk

Profiles and links

ORCID Google Scholar University of Essex ResearchGate GitHub LinkedIn Embry-Riddle feature story Embry-Riddle alumni spotlight, 2026