Joint Effort from FSF and IATA
Alexandria, VA, September 10, 2009 — The Flight Safety Foundation announced today the release of the Runway Excursion Risk Reduction (RERR) Toolkit. The toolkit, a joint effort between FSF and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), provides an in depth analysis of runway excursion accident data, a compilation of significant risk factors, and provides recommendations for operators, pilots, airports, Air Traffic Management, Air Traffic Controllers and regulators to assist in addressing this challenge.
“At the request of several international aviation organizations, the Flight Safety Foundation initiated a Runway Safety Initiative (RSI) to address the challenge of runway safety,” noted FSF President and CEO William R. Voss. “This was an international effort with participants representing the full spectrum of stakeholders from the aviation community. We wanted to reach out to the entire aviation community with the findings and working with IATA to produce a tool kit containing this information made a great deal of sense as they were one of the RSI participants.”
After reviewing all areas of runway safety over the past 14 years, the RSI group focused on runway excursions as they discovered that 97% of runway accidents were caused by excursions. They also found that over the past 14 years, there had been almost 30 excursions per year for commercial aircraft (over 25% of all accidents). The study also noted that although the percentage of excursions that included fatalities was low, the sheer number of excursions still meant that there were a high number of fatalities. Independent of the FSF effort, IATA’s Safety Group had identified runway excursions as a significant safety challenge to address.
The final report of the Foundation’s RSI effort, titled “Reducing the Risk of Runway Excursions”, was released in June of 2009 and provides data on runway accidents, notes the high risk areas, and provides interventions. This report is included, along with other valuable information and presentations, in the Runway Excursion Risk Reduction Toolkit.
Information about obtaining a copy of the RERR Toolkit can be found at www.flightsafety.org or www.iata.org.
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Flight Safety Foundation is an independent, nonprofit, international organization engaged in research, auditing, education, advocacy and publishing to improve aviation safety. The Foundation’s mission is to pursue the continuous improvement of global aviation safety and the prevention of accidents. www.flightsafety.org
Contact: Emily McGee, Director of Communications, 1-703-739-6700, ext. 126; mcgee@flightsafety.org