“Best Practices” To Be Focus
FAA officials have asked leaders from the bizav community to attend a meeting on Feb. 18 in Washington, D.C., to address safety issues. A recent rash of GA accidents involving charter flights and bizjets has raised questions in the mainstream media about the safety of the sector, but the FAA has said this meeting is not in response to that but is part of a continuing review of the industry as a whole. The purpose of the meeting is to exchange ideas, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told USA Today. “If there are safety programs or best practices that some of the operators are using that they can share with the rest of the community, then we’d like to make that available to everybody,” she said. Expected at the meeting are representatives from NBAA, the National Air Transportation Association, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, the NTSB, and others. NBAA’s Steve Brown told AVweb yesterday that there is no formal agenda for the meeting yet, but he expects that issues such as pilot training, maintenance and aging aircraft will be addressed. “The record shows our safety level has been improving, but we’re always looking for opportunities to improve further,” he said. Over the last three years, FAA data shows there were 0.077 fatal accidents per million commercial airline flights, while business aviation had 0.33 fatal accidents per million flights, according to The Washington Post. Such comparisons can be misleading because GA flights are so diverse, operating under various sets of rules in a wide variety of equipment. Corporate jets flown by professional crews, for example, often match or beat the airlines’ safety record.
