The e-mail we received here at Flying from Col. Sid “Scroll” Mayeux, chief of aviation safety at the United States Air Force Safety Center, was a little hard to believe. “Last year (Fiscal Year 2009),” Mayeux’s e-mail read, “was the USAF’s safest year in aviation safety, with 17 Class A Aviation Flight Mishaps for a 0.8 rate per 100,000 flying hours.”
One might think that the job of attaining a level of safety like that, given the Air Force’s high-flying, high-tech fleet of aircraft, was an impossible task, and I would have been right there with you. Somehow, though, the Air Force seems to have hit upon a formula for safety that last year approached perfection.
