Flight Safety Foundation

The art, science and AI of reviewing global airline safety performance

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you want to review current airline safety performance you can ask your favourite AI function to do it for you. Microsoft’s appropriately named Copilot, perhaps?

And if you prefer to see the accident and incident detail item by item, and then crunch the numbers yourself, you can visit the Flight Safety Foundation’s excellent Aviation Safety Network site.

Faced with all this competition, it is easy to see why aviation publications these days are less likely to pay experts like me to write a review for them. For example, for more than the last four decades Flight International/FlightGlobal has commissioned me to review airline safety annually, with briefer reviews at each half-year point. For the last two years the publishers have dropped the January-June reviews, and have decided this year not to commission me to carry out the annual review of 2026.

I am not privy to decisionmaking processes within Flight International/FlightGlobal, so I genuinely don’t know whether they intend, in future, to generate an annual airline safety review internally, or to drop the accustomed review on the grounds that AI-generated reports and expert sites like the Aviation Safety Network are so easy for readers to access free of charge that it’s not worth allocating the resources to produce it.

Beyond those resouces there are subscription services like Cirium aviation analytics. Today’s professional media are constantly having to review what they cover and how they cover it in the light of AI, data suppliers, and social media developments.

Curious to find out what AI might make of my request to generate a summary review of global airline safety for the first six months of 2026 “in the style of David Learmount”, Chat GPT provided this:

“The first six months of 2026 have reinforced a familiar truth about commercial aviation safety: the industry’s underlying safety performance remains exceptionally strong, but public confidence continues to be shaped by a handful of highly visible accidents and serious incidents. While individual events have prompted intense scrutiny, there is no compelling evidence that the global system has suffered a deterioration in safety standards. Rather, they have highlighted the enduring importance of disciplined operational execution, effective oversight, and continuous learning.The industry’s long-term trajectory remains positive, with accident rates still measured in fractions of a million flights and safety improvements driven by better technology, training, and data-led risk management. Yet the first half of the year has also served as a reminder that commercial aviation can never regard safety as an achievement that is complete. Every serious occurrence is an opportunity to identify latent weaknesses before they align, reaffirming that vigilance—not complacency—is the defining characteristic of a mature safety culture.“

While not disagreeing with anything in that summary, I can honestly say that none of the actual sentences would ever be the product of my own pen! Most of those expert journalists I know who have carried out a similar exercise on a subject they know well report that the result is – inevitably – an assembly of terminally bland copy full of generalisations, even if the generalisations are accurate as far as they go.

So, is this the end of the journalistic road for human-generated expert reviews? Time will tell, but I will still go to the motoring journals for a personal review of cars before I consider buying a new one, partly because I want to tap into the writer’s years of experience, but mostly because I want to enjoy the process of becoming informed.

What do you think?

Trump, Musk and the FAA

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Just as President Donald Trump rushed to claim that the 29 January mid-air collision over the Potomac River was the result of air traffic control incompetence resulting from the Federal Aviation Administration’s application of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies in controller recruitment, so others have lined up to point out that there has been an unusual cluster of serious US fatal air accidents since his appointment as POTUS.

Anyone with a brain knows that neither claim has any causal connection with reality.

But I am serving notice today that this blog will examine any proposals that emerge from the Trump-appointed DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) regarding the funding or reorganization of the FAA, and I invite senior executives and employees of the FAA, the airlines and general aviation bodies to report on substantive changes ordered by DOGE by responding to this blog.

Like others who care about maintaining and advancing aviation safety, I am wary of politically-inspired tinkering with an important oversight agency by leaders who have no expertise in the management of aviation safety. Trump’s first lieutenant Elon Musk, a man of many talents, has been entrusted with heading DOGE. He has a businessman’s appetite for risk-taking.

As Boeing acknowledges, business skills wielded by those for whom safety and quality control is an important concern, but whose primary objective has become shareholder returns, can get the balance wrong and damage both.

The USA has led the post-war world in advancing civil aviation safety, with the FAA being its general and the Flight Safety Foundation its standard-bearer. If the FAA’s ability to oversee industry safety performance and to manage the USA’s airspace is diminished in the name of “efficiency”, it affects global aviation, so the world will be watching with its own interests at heart. The FAA is an agency, a public service, it is not a business.

This appeal for reader feedback will have to be carefully managed, because at this stage the proposed Trump/Musk policies inspire apprehension without advancing any substance worthy of appraisal.

But soon actions will loom, and appraisal must begin.

The risks of Washington Reagan airport

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The fatal mid-air collision over the Potomac River next to Washington Reagan airport on 30 January is seen by many industry commentators, including myself, as an accident waiting to happen. Today it happened.

A PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 twinjet (N709PS), operating as American Eagle flight 5342 from Wichita to Washington, collided with a US Army Sikorsky H-60 Blackhawk over the Potomac. Authorities now say there are not expected to be any survivors among the 64 people on board the PSA flight or the three crewmen in the Blackhawk.

The collision occurred at night but in good visibility, at a height of about 300ft, just as the PSA CRJ turned onto short final approach for runway 33 at Reagan. The airport is right next to the west bank of the Potomac, and the CRJ had been tracking north following the river. Washington tower asked the CRJ crew if they could accept a landing on runway 33, instead of 01 which they had been expecting. A CRJ pilot confirmed that they had visual contact with runway 33 and could accept it. When they approached the extended centreline for runway 33, the crew turned left to position on final approach, and the collision occurred just as they started to cross the river.

Reagan airport is very much a downtown airfield, with the heart of Washington just across the river to the north east, the Pentagon with its helipad immediately to its north west – and Arlington beyond that, and Alexandria to the south. The river is one of the principal corridors for helicopter traffic, most heavily used by the military and White House movements, and Reagan airport itself operates most of the time close to capacity. It is popular with politicians, business people and lobbyists because it is much closer to the heart of power than the city’s international airport at Dulles, more than an hour away in Virginia.

It is not clear whether any party to this accident made a classifiable mistake. It was nighttime, but visibility was good, and air traffic controllers were relying on pilots being able to make visual contact with other close aircraft when they had been advised of their relative position. But it would be easy for the navigation and anti-collision lights of the two aircraft to be lost among the city lights on both river banks, and easy to identify the wrong set of lights before confirming to ATC that they believed they had the other aircraft in visual contact.

In other words, this is a very busy environment, and because of political pressure to keep a downtown airport constantly available for use, Reagan airport and the terminal area around it operates knowingly with risk margins that seriously need reviewing. They probably will be reviewed as a part of the investigation into this accident, but the warnings have been there for years, and still the politicians want their downtown airport to continue doing business at a rate that entails serious risk.

In March 2024 the President and CEO of the US-based Flight Safety Foundation Hassan Shahidi remarked on the fragility of the US air traffic control services in the face of continually escalating demand. He wrote then: “The ongoing issues with runway incursions and other serious safety and quality concerns signal that safety buffers within the industry are being stretched thin. The industry is grappling with numerous challenges, including the recruitment, sourcing, and training of tens of thousands of new workers, the rising demand for travel, and the need to accommodate new and diverse types of operations within the airspace system.”

Speaking about the Washington accident today, President Trump has already been critical of air traffic control, but sees the problem as being caused by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) adherence to diversity recruiting policies, which he has now stopped. The FAA, a government agency, is responsible for providing America’s air traffic control, and it depends for its funding on the government and congressional approval. If it is under-funded, as the Flight Safety Foundation’s Shahidi implies in his quotation above, President Trump has the power do something about it beyond stopping a diversity recruiting policy.

Flydubai accident update from MAK

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Russian accident investigator MAK has released preliminary information from the flight data recorder suggesting that there was no mechanical or aircraft systems fault in the Flydubai Boeing 737-800 at the time it appeared to go out of control and crash on final approach to Rostov on Don (see details in blog entry for 20 March).

Also since the previous blog story was written, video imagery has been released indicating that the final trajectory of the aircraft to impact was a nose-down high speed dive, which matches closely the flight profile of a Tatarstan Airlines 737-500 before it crashed on approach to Kazan, Russia in November 2013 (see also 20 March story for details).

If the MAK confirms these details in a fuller release soon it will highlight a need for the industry to train crews better for all-engines go-around manoeuvres because of the potentially dangerous combination – especially at night or in IMC – of the strong pitch-up moment caused by go-around power from underslung engines, plus “somatogravic illusion” in the pilots. Somatogravic illusion is the feeling induced by rapid forward acceleration that the nose has pitched up when it has not.

Another factor in this lack of crew familiarity with all-engines-go-around risks is believed to be that the go-arounds most practiced during recurrent training involve an engine-out abandoned approach, in which the power, pitch-up moment, climb rate and airspeed acceleration are all much more gentle.

The Flight Safety Foundation has been alerting airlines to this risk for many years now, and some airlines have modified their recurrent training accordingly.

Pilot groups in Dubai are also alleging that crew fatigue may have played a part in this accident. If this is true, it will emerge in the MAK final report.