In 2011, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) placed the safety of the country’s entire general aviation (GA) sector on its Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements — and has kept some form of the issue on the list ever since. The NTSB’s actions were triggered by concern about the average of nearly 1,500 GA accidents per year that kill more than 400 pilots and passengers.
The NTSB, which noted that most of these were “repeat accidents” — more precisely, accidents attributed to the same causes that have been assigned to many previous accidents and that occur under similar circumstances — issued 10 safety alerts in 2013, and several more in 2014, that specifically address GA fixed-wing and rotorcraft safety issues.1
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also is concerned about the disproportionate number of accidents in this sector — 92 percent of all fatal accidents in 2011 were GA accidents, with the majority attri…
