As the number of general aviation fatal accidents continues a 25-year downward trend, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s Air Safety Institute (AOPA ASI) pushes to “make sure we don’t take our foot off the accelerator.”

The latest ASI Joseph T. Nall Report found that 2016 reached new lows in fatal general aviation accidents, the most recent year in which a probable cause had been determined on at least 80 percent of the accidents. An initial look at 2017 data suggests that the trend continues.

But for ASI executive director Richard McSpadden, the bigger picture is that the number of fatal accidents been cut in half since the mid-1990s. “That’s a phenomenal achievement in roughly 25 years,” he said. While the sector has had ups and downs throughout that period, the overall trajectory is down, he added.

This improvement is multi-faceted, McSpadden said. One key driver is the availability of new safety-enhancing technologies that are far more affordable to install—now light aircraft can have autopilots for less than $10,000.

Notably, the latest Nall report found that light fixed-wing, non-commercial weather-related accidents were less than half of what they were a decade ago. “That’s a really substantial drop and the one we’ve been waiting on because of this new cockpit weather technology we have,” he said. The industry will continue to monitor that metric, he added. “This technology is so valuable it keeps getting better and better and helps pilots make decisions. How can that not impact safety?”

Also helping is the more collaborative environment that has evolved between the FAA and industry. Since the agency adopted its Compliance Program about five years ago, “There’s a whole different dynamic of how you see pilots interact with the FAA,” McSpadden said. “It’s not as much us-versus-them—hide everything from them because they might yank your ticket. You see a lot more collaboration going on.”

AOPA encourages pilots to view the FAA as a resource when they need help, he said. The FAA does not tolerate willful violations, but it would typically direct a pilot to take additional training rather than undertake an enforcement action for inadvertent violations, especially for the first time. “Everyone wins in that scenario,” he said, adding that the pilot who is honest about a mistake gets enhanced training and the FAA achieves its safety goal.

“There are really five principles to safe operations,” he said “If you take knowledgeable people, train them well, keep them proficient, put them in reliable equipment—it doesn’t have to be the most modern but it does need to be reliable—and you surround them in a culture that enables good decision-making, you’ll run safe operations. We’ve made progress across all five of those aspects through the last 25 years; and it shows.”

But while improvements have been made, McSpadden stressed the importance of the industry continuing its concerted effort to address key accident factors. “Our goal is; we want that at zero,” said McSpadden. “As much progress as we’ve made, we have a lot of progress to make and that we can make.”  

To that end, McSpadden recently led a webinar to discuss potential traps unique to the holidays that impact aviation decision-making. That webinar was promoted by several general aviation and business aviation associations as the industry collectively works to reduce the fatal accident rate.

A number of those associations collaborate with the FAA on the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee (GA-JSC), which takes a data-driven approach to address key factors in accidents. “The GA-JSC is by far the most effective government-industry group I’ve ever been a part of,” McSpadden said. Participants may not always agree, but they work toward consensus, he said.

That group already has developed nearly three-dozen recommended safety enhancements aimed at the single biggest cause of fatal general aviation accidents—loss of control. “They’ve dropped across the board in that 25 years, but percentage-wise they are still 45 percent of our fatal accidents,” McSpadden said. “Instead of 45 percent of 500 fatal accidents, it's 45 percent of 220 fatal accidents. We’ve made progress, but we want to make more.”

Next up are the release of recommended safety enhancements for another major cause of fatal accidents, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). The GA-JSC CFIT working group compiled its draft recommendations earlier in 2019 and hopes to release the final recommendations shortly.

One area still of concern to McSpadden, particularly in loss of control, is automation. “We all know automation is very helpful at the right time, but it can be very distracting to pilots at the wrong time. And if you over-rely on it, it can degrade your stick-and-rudder skills over time.” 

This makes it all the more important that pilots have proper transition training to understand what the automation does and doesn’t do, he said.

AOPA ASI is continuing its outreach to pilots and educational campaigns on these and other safety initiatives. The association plays a major role in education and public awareness, McSpadden said, noting, “Our material will be accessed over 7 million times this year.”