24 July 2007
The UK Airprox Board has issued its latest report, covering the statistics for all of 2006. It also includes detailed reports of reported airproxes in the second half of 2006.
Overall, the report concludes that the number of airprox incidents in 2006 was lower than in previous years – 159 were reported in 2006 as compared with 188 in 2005. Of these, 74 involved at least one Commercial Air Transport flight; of these 74 six were assessed as ‘risk-bearing’, while none fell into the Category A ‘actual risk of collision bracket’.
The Airprox numbers involving military and GA aircraft were also down.
The report shows that an estimated 1,363,000 hours were flown by GA in 2006 (down 1.8 percent on 2005) with 46 ‘risk bearing’ incidents and 57 non-risk-bearing ones. Among these 103 incidents, 27 were assigned a causal factor of ‘did not see conflicting traffic’; 23 were put down to ‘inadequate avoiding action/flew too close’; another 23 ‘late sighting of conflicting traffic’; 16 ‘did not adhere to prescribed procedures’; 9 ‘penetration of CAS/ATZ without permission’; 8 to poor airmanship; 7 ‘climbed/descended through assigned level’ and 6 to ‘not obeying orders/following advice/from ATC’. (If you’re counting, some incidents were assigned more than one cause – and we haven’t included the full list here).
Most (70 percent) of incidents occurred in Class G airspace.
