UNITED STATES
NAAA INSIGHTS
National Agricultural Aviation Association
10 Tips from NAAA and NAAREF to Keep You Flying Safe
A daily checklist to follow to ensure your season is safe and productive.
B 2 | agairupdate.com
Nearly a quarter-century ago the poignant phrase “Upon the Performance of Each Rests the Fate of All” was coined as an expression of responsibility and solidarity among aerial applicators. If you’ve ever attended the PAASS Program—the flagship educational program of NAAA and NAAREF—at a state convention, then you have heard those words uttered more than once. NAAA and its sister organization NAAREF take that motto seriously and ag pilots should too, particularly now that the summer flying season is in full swing and all eyes are upon us. With that in mind, here is a daily checklist to follow to ensure your season is safe and productive. Establish Personal Minimums: NAAA encourages each pilot to establish personal minimums and make them hard and fast rules to live by. In your desire to get the job completed quickly and still do a good job for your customer, it can be very easy to justify an action “just this one time.” Spur-of-the-moment decisions can bite you. Establish your own personal minimums after considering all conceivable hazards and evaluating mitigation measures for those hazards. Once established, the safety bar should not be lowered just because you were able to get away with something once. Watch Out for Obstructions: Obstructions have always been hazardous to low-level pilots’ health, but the number of telecommunications towers, GPS differential signal towers, meteorological evaluation towers, wind turbines and other obstructions erected in agricultural regions has increased significantly over the past several years. Each year NAAA tracks Part 137 accidents
investigated by the NTSB. A review of 2019’s Part 137 accidents reveals that wires were the most common object hit in controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents last year. Wire strikes accounted for 61% of all CFIT accidents and 75% of the fatal CFIT accidents in 2019. NAAREF feels it is imperative to remind pilots of these potentially deadly hazards and present some suggestions for coping with these in-flight dangers. The foundation produced an obstruction awareness video titled “Wires and Obstructions” to do just that. The video discusses obstructions such as wires, trees and towers that are a hazard to pilots operating in the low-level airspace on a daily basis, as well as UAVs. NAAA and NAAREF encourage pilots to review the “Wires and Obstructions” video as often as necessary to keep these obstacle-avoidance lessons in mind. Watch it at AgAviation.org/safetyeducationvideos. The Human Factors module of the 20192020 PAASS Program took a closer look at CFIT accidents. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, a CFIT accident is one where an airworthy aircraft under the control of a qualified pilot is flown into terrain. While terrain implies the ground, it encompasses all other obstacles that originate from the ground such as trees, wires and towers—even water. Five CFIT accidents were discussed in the module. A refresher on the CFIT module and the rest of the 2019-20 PAASS Program is available in the Spring 2020 issue of Agricultural Aviation at AgAviationMagazine.org. Monitor Medications: The FAA has issued new guidance to pilots regarding which overthe-counter medications are safe to fly on.
