About 18 percent of flight crews on business aviation flights from 2013 through 2015 failed to conduct a complete pre-takeoff check of flight controls, according to a National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) study.1
The study — urged by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in a safety recommendation prompted by its investigation of the fatal May 31, 2014, crash of a Gulfstream G-IV in Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S., which followed the pilots’ failure to remove the airplane’s gust lock before takeoff2 — analyzed 143,756 business aviation flights conducted in 379 business aircraft during the three-year period.3
Results of the NBAA study showed that about 15 percent of those flights “began with a partial flight control check, and 2 percent began without a full, valid check,†the NBAA said. The organization defined a “full, valid†check as “the stop-to-stop deflection of all flight controls specified by a manufacturerâ…
