iPad Apps help cut fatal crashes of private planes to new lows

Fatalities in crashes of small private planes have fallen to the lowest levels in decades as industry and government work to address an area of aviation that has lagged behind jetliners in dramatic safety improvements.

While aviation crash analysts caution that it’s still too early to say for sure that the data represents a long-term trend, the declining number of fatal crashes and deaths are a sign of possible progress.

The number of fatal crashes per year on small private planes averaged 180 per year from 2013 through 2015, according to a report to be released today by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. That’s a 17.8 percent decline compared to the previous three-year period.

“It goes to a trend we’ve seen in the last several years,” said George Perry, who heads AOPA’s Air Safety Institute. “Safety numbers have been significantly better year-over-year.”

Lowest Recorded

Among the factors credited for the decline: better training of pilots and technological advancements that make planes easier to fly and provide up-to-date weather and other information. That can range from advanced crash-avoidance systems to apps for mobile devices.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which tabulates private-plane accidents using slightly different criteria, calculated the rate of fatal crashes in the 2015 fiscal year was the lowest it had recorded, 1.03 per 100,000 flight hours, according to a July 28 fact sheet. The number of private-plane flights per year has been falling, so the decline in the accident rate is less steep than the drop in overall accidents.

The data should be approached with care because there is less information collected on general aviation as compared to commercial operations and the declining accident rate has been relatively small, said John Hansman, an astronautics and aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the data jibes with broad new efforts to improve safety in that arena, Hansman said.

“It’s encouraging,” said Hansman, who has studied private-aircraft safety data. “There are reasons to think it might be accurate. There’s a lot of things happening in the system that are slowly making it better.”

IPad Apps

Electronic devices, including aviation applications for Apple Inc. iPads and other mobile devices, are giving pilots much better weather information than just a few years ago, and newer planes are easier and safer to fly, he said. Bloomberg/GB