DAVID LEARMOUNT / WASHINGTON DC
But FSF says 2003 could yet be safest year if there are no more serious incidents
Efforts to reduce controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents are failing, warns the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF), as the number of incidents continues to increase. However, airline accident figures at 1 October showed 2003 is on track to become the safest year in history if there are no more serious crashes.
The CFIT problem is particularly bad, FSF's director of technical programmes Jim Burin told FSF's international aviation safety seminar (IASS) in Washington DC last week, because it is the accident category that kills more people than any other.
With 11 hull-loss accidents by 1 October compared with 19 in 2002, the accident rate for Western-built jet aircraft of more than 25,000kg (55,000lb) is heading for an all-time low of 0.62 per million departures providing there are no serious crashes before year-end, Burin said. Three of the hull-loss crashes listed by the FSF were not fatal.
Taking the shine off the apparently promising statistics, said Burin, is the fact that there had already been seven CFIT hull losses by 1 October, whereas in the whole of 2002 - which itself was a bad year for CFIT - there were only five. In addition, out of the 11 hull losses, eight occurred in the approach and landing phase, a factor that the FSF has been trying to address.
The International Air Transport Association, a partner in the IASS, also assesses the year so far as generally safe, saying that the fatal accident rate for large airliners looks "better than" the figure of 0.72 per million departures in 2002, which was the industry's best-ever rate.
The US Federal Aviation Administration's commercial aviation safety team (CAST) is hopeful that much can yet be done to improve safety performance.
Since 2000 CAST has identified a set of priority safety areas including CFIT and runway incursions and derived risk reduction plans to deal with them.
The safety team had set a target to reduce the serious airline accident rate in the USA by 80% before 2007, and has calculated that if the risk-reduction measures it has identified are implemented successfully, they have the potential to lower accident rates by 73% from now, which would mean its target would be met.
Source: Flight International
