Against the backdrop of several high-profile close calls and other incidents, NBAA’s safety committee has taken a close look at its top focus areas and updated them to reflect business aviation concerns that have come under the spotlight.
“There's a significant acknowledgment that things aren't going as we expected based on these near collisions,” Doug Carr, NBAA's senior v-p of safety, security, sustainability, and international operations, told AIN. “Fortunately, we've got this multilayered safety system that has prevented some of these collisions from happening…but there's a decent amount of ‘almost happens’ and that has got everybody's attention right now.”
As for the reasons behind these incidents, Carr believes several factors play a role, including a workforce that is in transition with a wave of retirements that occurred during the pandemic. “All that experience walked out the door, and we didn't necessarily have a good transition of that knowledge to those who would come in after them,” he said.
Further, he added, operations have surpassed pre-pandemic levels. “The system itself is being fully utilized, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It was designed to handle all of this. But combine a workforce with perhaps less total experience with a system that is now operating at near capacity and, in some cases, the lack of sufficient resources to manage it effectively,” Carr said.
“I think there's pretty wide acknowledgment that we are experiencing the additive effects of challenges [stemming from the pandemic]. We've got to find a way to close [those holes] and get our system risk back to historic levels based on experience, workforce, and training levels that we're used to.”
While the incidents have received significant media attention, they’ve also captured the scrutiny of Congress, the FAA, and the industry itself. Carr noted that the FAA gathered the industry together earlier this year for the first wide-ranging safety summit in more than a decade. He called the move “emblematic…reflecting the state of the system.”
While most had a good sense of some of the problems, Carr said the question is “how do we address them and how do we fix them? I think [the roundtable] has given the industry the opportunity to double down on the areas that it feels it has an opportunity to impact.”
NBAA's safety committee took the output from the summit and probed the areas discussed. The move to update the top safety focus areas is a result of that probe. “We're going to make a few changes to reflect some areas in the ‘here and now’ that we believe are important,” he said of the top safety focus areas.
The areas are comprehensive covering preventable accidents that involve issues such as loss of control and runway excursions; operations, including fitness for duty and covering mental health and workforce, among other areas; and mitigations, such as safety management systems and use of data.
Carr emphasized the importance of data in the safety equation. “There can't be enough said today about the value of data—collecting it, measuring it, improving it, and what gets measured and gets improved,” he said.
“We're hoping to move the needle on safety in any of the areas that we're talking about such as loss of control, runway excursions, CFIT, ground operations, and ramp rash.”
He noted that while some of the issues thread across aviation, some have recurred within business aviation in particular, such as circling approaches.
“Just because you're doing a circle delay on approach in a simulator flying out of Memphis and JFK [John F. Kennedy International Airport] doesn't mean you're necessarily prepared for circling approaches in the real world,” he said. “There's an opportunity for training to really double down to create realistic scenarios for our community.”
Another area is single-pilot operations. In fact, this is such an important area that NBAA hosts a Single-Pilot Safety Standdown on the eve of NBAA-BACE every year. And this year was no different.
In describing the activities surrounding NBAA-BACE 2023, Carr said, “You'll see a safety strategy that will look familiar but with a renewed emphasis on the issues of the day.”
The safety standdown is dedicated to issues that owner-operators and single pilots face and features experts discussing loss of control, CFIT, and “all the things that we see the data telling us are risks for the single-pilot community.”
Throughout this year's BACE is a National Safety Forum, which Carr described as “a broader safety-focused event on issues that affect everyone.”
During the week are numerous sessions on topics covering areas such as pilot mental health, safety management systems, and other issues. Supporting these efforts are officials from the National Transportation Safety Board and FAA.
“So, there’s safety content every day [at BACE]. We're talking about where our industry is doing well, where we have an opportunity to improve, and what can help with that improvement either through industry best practices, NBAA tools, product services, or other resources that may be out there,” Carr said.