In recent years, business aircraft have experienced runway excursions at a higher rate than commercial air transports, says Gerard van Es, senior consultant for flight operations and safety, Air Transport Safety Institute, National Aerospace Laboratory of the Netherlands (NLR).
His study’s starting point was the runway excursion rate per million flights for the last three calendar years (Figure 1). “What I’ve compared here is commercial operations with business operations — business jets, business turboprops worldwide,” he said. “[NLR] looked at accidents, incidents, serious incidents, minor incidents, and tried to be as complete as possible. … In these three years, it’s almost a factor of two as between commercial operations and business operations.”
Looking at the analysis of runway excursions, in business operations versus commercial operations, NLR essentially saw the same causal factors. “We saw them with the same frequency in the major accidents and the seri…
