EAA Attends CFIT Working Group

December 14, 2017 - This week, EAA Government Relations Director Tom Charpentier attended a working group on controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), chartered by the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee’s Safety Analysis Team. The working group looks at a random sampling of fatal CFIT accidents to determine what went wrong and introduce nonregulatory solutions and interventions for future accident prevention.

“These working groups give us the information we need to hopefully break the accident chains that created these tragedies in the future,” Charpentier said. “It’s also a great educational opportunity for all of us to take a look at these accidents and see what the causal factors are. Sometimes they’re surprising. Sometimes we make assumptions in general aviation about how accidents happen that get challenged by the data.”

This is the fourth working group chartered by GAJSC, with previous subjects including loss of control (LOC) accidents and engine failures. The working groups are attended by industry and aviation groups including AOPA, GAMA, NBAA, and more. To see the results and recommendations of the LOC and engine-failure working groups visit the GAJSC website.

“Over the past seven years, the GAJSC has helped to direct outreach, policy changes, and other measures that have had a meaningful impact on the declining accident rate that we see today,” said EAA Vice President of Advocacy and Safety Sean Elliott, who serves as the industry co-chair for GAJSC. “We look forward to similar results from the CFIT working group.”