Throughout the past year, Flight Safety Foundation has been focusing on several important issues, including runway safety and go-arounds; data analysis, sharing and protection; and operating in remote and dangerous environments. Late last year, we added airborne conflict to this list. These are all areas that affect aviation safety — and all areas where we can make a difference.
The absence of recent large-scale airborne conflict accidents does not mean the system is without risk. In fact, our data-driven approach to safety, in which we look specifically at incident precursors during normal operations in order to identify not only the areas of greatest risk but also paths to mitigation, shows that we have had some alarming near-midair collisions recently. These “near accidents” remind us that, while we may have escaped disaster, we need to examine what happened and ensure that the safety buffers we have built into the system are sufficient and not being compromised.
In these ne…
