AOPA Air Safety Institute’s 22nd Joseph T. Nall Report, General Aviation Accidents in 2010, is hot off the presses and it shows a promising trend in some areas of general aviation safety. Despite a slight increase in the number of GA operations, the number of accidents dropped in 2010 as compared with 2009.
All segments of aviation saw increases in operations. Commercial helicopter operations increased by 21 percent and at the same time there were 22 percent fewer accidents. Non-commercial fixed-wing operations saw a slight 3-percent increase along with a slight decrease in the number of accidents. But with 6.30 accidents and 1.16 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours, the accident rate for these types of operations remained comparable with what the report has found in the past 10 years. In an opening statement of the report, the AOPA Foundation said: “One thing that just doesn’t seem to change annually is the excess risk that some pilots are willing to take on for personal flights. They accounted for almost 80 percent of all fixed-wing accidents but barely 40 percent of the corresponding flight time.”
