Aviation safety priorities in emerging air transport systems

This paper describes a meta-analysis of aviation safety summaries. The intent is to demonstrate that domestic aviation safety priorities have been influenced by summaries and analyses of worldwide aviation accident data. This paper further demonstrates that priorities in aviation safety may change when the parameters of an analysis vary by technologic, geographic, or regulatory attributes. This paper also discusses the validity of transferring priorities in aviation safety across industry segments (delineated by these same attributes), each of which may have unique hazard and vulnerability exposures. Collectively, this paper discusses the potential for identified aviation safety priorities (which may be biased toward dominant industry segments) to mask unique hazard and vulnerability exposures inherent in emerging aviation markets. This potential biasing of safety priorities becomes a more critical topic when viewed from the perspective of a future commercial aviation industry with a greater reliance on Part 135 commuter- and air-taxi-type operations using nontowered airports under a high-volume operations paradigm.