ACSF Seeks Support for Single Audit Safety Standard

The Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF) is trying to encourage charter and fractional operators to support the move to a single safety audit standard to end confusion about the multiple standards currently being used and the cost of auditing to the various standards. ACSF president Bryan Burns is inviting industry participants to a May 4 meeting of the NATA air charter committee in Washington, D.C., where the audit standard issue will be discussed. Some operators face up to half a dozen audits per year at a cost of $10,000 to $15,000 each, he explained, and it would be far simpler if they had one standard–the ACSF standard–to comply with. Recently, according to Burns, Executive Jet Management (EJM), the charter/management arm of fractional operator NetJets, devised its own audit standard that supplemental-lift providers have to undergo. EJM helped launch the ACSF standard, he added. “When we went to market EJM embraced it, and up till the first of this year endorsed it and used it. The ACSF standard was what operators had to comply with to supply supplemental lift to EJM. When the announcement was made and EJM decided to go internally with its own standard, it left us a little bit confused.” In a statement provided to AIN, NetJets noted that its standards department conducts regular on-site evaluations of charter vendors. “As a result of these regular evaluations performed by NetJets, the company has gained valuable insight to the overall safety and security of NetJets’ vendors. Based on this insight, NetJets has decided to perform the vendor auditing process internally.”