Aviation Safety Priorities in Emerging Air Transport Systems

Abstract

technologic, geographic, or regulatory attributes. This paper also discusses the validity of transferring priorities in aviation safety across industry segments (delineated by these same attributes), each of which may have unique hazard and vulnerability exposures. Collectively, this paper discusses the potential for identified aviation safety priorities (which may be biased toward dominant industry segments) to mask unique hazard and vulnerability exposures inherent in emerging aviation markets. This potential biasing of safety priorities becomes a more critical topic when viewed from the perspective of a future commercial aviation industry with a greater reliance on Part 135 commuter- and air-taxi-type operations using nontowered airports under a high-volume operations paradigm. I. Introduction T HIS paper has two purposes. The first is to demonstrate that priorities in aviation safety can be biased toward specific industry segments that may not be fully representative of other subsets of aviation. The second is to demonstrate that establishing safety priorities based on worldwide operations or specific segments of aviation may not be directly applicable to all subsets that cross regional (national or continental), regulatory (Code of Federal Regulations, or CFR, Title 14 Parts 121 and 135), or technological (jet, turboprop, large aircraft, small aircraft, etc.) boundaries. Specifically, this paper demonstrates that safety priorities in domestic commercial aviation operations have been biased to reflect the accident profile of international commercial operations. A metaanalysis of published safety summaries is used to demonstrate the limitations of any assumption that an accident profile of some subset within a global aviation market is correlated to global aviation in the aggregate. The authors consider this review of real vs perceived domestic commercial aviation safety priorities to be a critical factor in forming the perspective that emerging and nascent aircraft operations and aviation markets, such as high-volume operations (HVO) at nontowered airports and the burgeoning air-taxi industry using light and very light jets (VLJ), may have unique hazard and vulnerability exposures relative to more traditional commercial aviation markets. If these emerging industry sectors are not critically analyzed for sector-specific hazards and vulnerabilities, there is a potentialforincreasednumbersandratesofaccidentsasthesesectors grow. Any such increase could lead to subsequent delays in societal acceptance of HVO in the nontowered “community” airport environments and potential delays in the growth of these emerging aviation markets that would directly affect the capacity of the commercial air transport industry in the aggregate as the hub-andspoke infrastructure nears its maximum capacity. This paper first revisits an earlier work by the authors [1] that critically reviewed aviation accident data summaries compiled and released by various governmental, nongovernmental, and quasigovernmentalorganizations[2–6].Inthispreviouswork,theauthors