Disagreements Mount Over Safety Issues with VLJs

Air Safety Week, March 6, 2006

Although both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Air Transport Association (ATA) are raising certain safety concerns with very light jets (VLJs), some of the aircrafts' manufacturers believe the concerns are overblown.

ATA, especially, has already raised a host of safety issues with VLJs, particularly in relation to how the planes might congest the nation's airways when they start going into service later this year for private corporate travel or with air taxi services. Testifying before the House Aviation Subcommittee last Nov. 17, Basil J. Barimo, ATA's vice president of operations and safety, warned that the safety implications of these craft is something that the FAA will have to continue paying close attention to. He also posed to lawmakers a series of VLJ safety questions that he had no ready answers for, such as whether maintenance standards for privately owned aircraft are also appropriate for VLJs, and whether smaller, regional airports can handle any safety incidents.

But legislators have yet to bite in response to such concerns, at least publicly. There are no bills in the current congressional session that mention VLJs. Nor have there been any statements.

Still, VLJ manufacturers believe that most of the safety concerns are unfounded. "A lot of definitive statements are being made with no correlation to fact," says Vern Raburn, president and CEO of one manufacturer, Eclipse Aviation Corp. in Albuquerque, N.M. "A huge number of people, [particularly in] the air transport world, are prepared to make up their own facts," Raburn says.

Meanwhile, the FAA has been quietly working on certain aspects of VLJ safety that involve ensuring that the capacity of air traffic control (ATC), the special training of controllers and would-be VLJ pilots, and the conditions under which these aircraft should be permitted single-pilot operations.

Much of the increase in the hours flown by the turboprop/turbojet fleet over the next decade will be attributable to VLJs, the FAA said Feb. 28 in its annual forecast of aviation trends. Specifically, that increase will be from 5 million hours in 2005 to 11.9 million in 2017, an average annual growth rate of 7.5 percent.

Generally speaking, it's anticipated that VLJs will revolutionize corporate travel and air taxi services -- that is, once the first craft are used for these services. In the meantime, it's disconcerting for manufacturers to hear that specific questions of safety are already being bandied about. "How can you talk about safety issues when none of these planes is flying?" an Eclipse spokesman asks.

Adam Blakely, speaking for another VLJ manufacturer, Adam Aircraft in Englewood, Colo., doesn't believe the new planes raise any particular safety issues, especially in comparison to the business jets that are already out there.

Yet, the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA), which says it represents more than 7,000 firms that own or operate general aviation craft, says, "The manufacturers of VLJs have started to look at the unique risks that exist for their products" dealing with such issues as wake turbulence and convective weather conditions.

In Raburn's view, Eclipse has already spent a "huge amount of time anticipating how to operate [VLJs] safely." This has been achieved, principally, in the VLJs' design. The new planes' navigational and avionics capabilities give pilots situational awareness that is at least comparable to, or surpasses that of, most transport airplanes that are flying today. Moreover, the entire management of the aircraft is electronic. Circuit breakers, for example, aren't hard to reach and are instead presented in logical sequences. Additionally, Eclipse has already put in far more flight test hours -- about 1,350 -- on its VLJs than the 800 hours Airbus reportedly has accumulated in testing the A380.

Talking to Air Safety Week, ATA's Barimo says the group's safety concerns with VLJs fall into two main areas. One involves congestion of the national airspace, stemming from the possibility that 4,500 VLJs could be added to the skies after another decade goes by. Unless something significant is done to change how the airspace is managed, then there might have to be limits on flights, he adds.

So far, ATA's main bone of contention with VLJs seems to be on a related issue -- that new aircraft will use airspace without their operators paying their fair, proportionate fee to support the ATC system.

Worries about VLJs quickly clogging up the U.S. airspace are quite premature, Blakely asserts. Selling a "few thousand planes" over the next 10 to 15 years, as Adam and its competitors hope to do, isn't like someone's going to "flip a switch" and suddenly thousands of VLJs appear in the air.

Plus, there's an aging aircraft issue, Blakely tells Air Safety Week. Many of the pre-orders are from owners and operators who are intending to replace legacy aircraft. Finally, there's the likelihood that business owners and other aircraft operators will gravitate toward smaller regional airports and avoid major hubs.