19 November 2008
The UK Airprox Board has published its annual report on the airprox incidents which involved GA in the year 2007. The report has been collated by Geoffrey Boot (a member of the FLYER writing team) who is Vice Chairman of AOPA and a very active and experienced GA pilot.
Geoffrey’s task in the report, which is published online at <a href=’http://www.airproxboard.org.uk/docs/423/gab15web.pdf’ target=’_blank’>www.airproxboard.org.uk/docs/423/gab15web.pdf</a>, is to highlight lessons to be learned by GA pilots from reports which involved at least one GA aircraft, and which were assessed as being in risk categories A (‘Risk of collision: an actual risk of collision existed’) or B (‘Safety not assured: the safety of the aircraft was compromised’).
The GA report is based on the main Airprox reports, which show that Airprox totals overall were fewer in 2006 than in 2007, although the GA airprox totals remained the same in 2007 as in 2006.
A total of 40 different factors leading to airprox involving GA aircraft were identified in 2007 assigned to the 103 airprox involving GA. Chief among these were ‘did not see conflicting traffic’ (28 instances); ‘late sighting of confliciting traffic’ (22 instances); ‘did not separate/poor judgement’ (12 instances) and penetration of CAS/SRZ/ATZ without clearance (11 instances).
In his GA report, Geoffrey chooses and comments on a number of individual reports which highlight themes he has chosen. These themes are ‘Flying close to or over active glider or para drop sites’, ‘What in essence boils down to poor airmanship’ and ‘Failure to adhere to prescribed procedures, pass or respond to information’.
As Peter Hunt, Director of the UK Airprox Board, says in his introduction, the purpose of the publication ‘is to identify for the GA community some of the flight safety lessons arising from Airprox events which occurred in UK airspace’. It certainly makes interesting reading, and there are undoubtedly lessons to be learnt.
