The accident rate in the U.S. air taxi sector declined 50 percent from 2004 to 2018, almost entirely because of a reduction in crashes involving medium- and high-performance airplanes, according to a study by researchers from the United States and Germany.
The accident rate for low-performance air taxi airplanes was relatively unchanged over the same 15-year period, the researchers said in a report published in the May issue of Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance.1ai
Researchers concluded that the safety deficits affecting low-performance air taxi aircraft – “deficient decision-making and skill-based errors on the part of the air crew and degraded visibility” – require increased training for pilots of these airplanes in instrument flying and in using the three-axis autopilot when visibility is poor, as well as improvements in safety culture.
The study involved a search of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) datab…
