Sector's record is not as good as it might like to think
Analysis of business jet safety incidents in UK airspace indicates that business aviation as a whole does not - as it might have believed - have an underlying safety record to rival that of the airlines, even if the top corporate sector of business aviation does.
UK air navigation service provider NATS says 3.5% of the movements in the airspace it manages are business jets, but 16% of level bust incidents 33% of failures to follow standard instrument departures 12% of altimeter setting errors and 10% of the particularly dangerous error in which a pilot correctly acknowledges a level change instruction but fails to carry it out, involve business jets.
NATS safety division chief Richard Schofield, addressing a safety seminar at EBACE last week, also revealed that 10% of "gross navigational errors" in the Shanwick Atlantic oceanic area are committed by business-jet crews, and said that although this represents a small number of incidents it is disproportionate to the amount of business jet activity.
As for runway incursion incidents, Schofield revealed, the largest number in the UK occur at London Heathrow airport. But that, he acknowledged, is a function of the airport's complexity and number of total movements, which includes a tiny proportion of business-aircraft operations. But the highest runway incursion rate in the UK occurs at Farnborough, which primarily handles business aircraft.
Schofield presented these statistics, he said, on the basis that incidents that are not heeded eventually become accidents. He pointed out that 25% of all business-jet incidents in UK airspace are level busts, and this rate is getting worse.
At the same seminar the UK Civil Aviation Authority head of flight operations David Chapman came to similar conclusions. Taking fatal accidents in UK per million flying hours, the total business-aviation rate is eight and a half times that for large public transport aircraft and in line with the rate for pure freight operations, which Chapman says is unacceptable. He also presented evidence that suggests one reason is that the airlines have bought in to the well-established mandatory occurrence reporting scheme, but reporting from the business-aviation sector is proportionately much lower.
However, data presented by business aviation safety analyst Robert Breiling and Stuart Matthews of the Flight Safety Foundation shows the best two pilot-operated corporatejet aviation has safety standards as good as those of the airlines.
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Source: Flight International
