Like the rest of the wider aviation industry, business and private aviation is always focussed on safety: keeping passengers and crews safe is the highest priority. The industry is still reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changing shape of future demand, as well as wider trends like longer stage lengths and more timezones being crossed. We sat down with Robert Baltus, chief operations officer at the European Business Aviation Association, for a deep dive into the new technologies available to operators — and to aviators.
Business aviation has benefited from many of the technological and methodological advances in aviation safety over recent years, from improved navigation equipment to safety management systems, anti-collision technology to live weather information.
But among innovations within the recent past, Baltus tells us, “particular safety-enhancing technology stands out when talking about business aviation: the Enhanced Flight Vision Systems (EFVS).”
EFVS is sometimes referred to without the “Flight” in its title as EVS, and is often colloquially called a heads-up display (HUD), which forms just one element of some EFVS systems.
This system, Baltus notes, “includes an array of sensors and cameras overlapping their recorded information into a picture of the surroundings, which is projected on a display — either head-mounted or head-up — for the pilot to gain a better understanding of the conditions.”
“EFVS,” Baltus highlights, “is used to enhance the pilot’s situational awareness in poor visibility, due to weather or haze, and at night.”
Infrared cameras, and particularly newer shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectrum cameras, can be useful additions to the visible light spectrum. Aircraft manufacturers within the private aviation sector have been emphasising these additional innovations as strong selling points in an industry where safety remains paramount.
Developments and expansion of the system are especially focussing on safety across flight phases, although approach and landing in poor visibility and other challenging conditions remain a priority.
On the piloting side, the duty hours agenda is seeing renewed interest.
“The main challenge long haul pilots face,” Baltus says, “is represented by multiple sector operations with time zone crossing: in other words, not returning to home base after outbound sector but with continued time zone crossings. The main aim of this effort is to ensure that the tables try to better represent the actual body clock, to ensure that the pilot is well rested — and [that] calculations are based on the actual time zone he or she is flying from.”
Crew fatigue has unique private aviation aspects
Fatigue management is an issue that business aviation has long recognised as a major risk, especially given its non-scheduled nature.
Inherently, there are fatigue risks around predictability in flight and duty schedules, which applies across the industry but particularly in the emergency medical services segment of private and business aviation.
Managing flight duty periods, especially where continuous acclimatisation is a challenge, remains a priority. Yet competing pressures — like the overall growth in demand, and especially spikes in that demand — make this management more complicated even than it was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Indeed,” explains Baltus, “the lack of predictability is one of the contributors to fatigue but the most important is that business aviation crews fly a lot less than the airline pilots compared over a longer period. Therefore, in our industry, we refer to fatigue rather than tiredness.”
Tools in the toolbox for operators and pilots include fatigue risk management systems (FRMS), whether those are used within the context of safety management systems (SMS) or independently. Whichever way they are implemented, the key factor is to take into account all the relevant elements, from travel or positioning time to duty time, minimum rest periods, time zones crossed, and more.
“The FRMS implementation is not common yet,” Baltus acknowledges, “although business aviation operators definitely see the benefits of having such a system in place. As our business revolves around safety, EBAA’s members acknowledge that the money and time invested for implementing the FRMS and training their personnel, outweigh the potential negative implications of a safety occurrence caused by fatigue.”
Using FRMS to conduct fatigue risk assessments can be very helpful, but it’s important for operators to remember and to recognise that any FRMS is inherently based on historical data.
Given the wide variety of operational missions for business aviation pilots — indeed, this is certainly much more diverse than for their commercial airline counterparts — it may well be that there is little or even no historical data for a particular route within an operator’s systems or a particular pilot’s experience.
As a result, the self-reporting and ongoing self-assessment element of fatigue risk management by pilots is especially important, as are the initiatives to share safety information at an early stage across operators.
Preparing for the world of advanced air mobility
AAM, or advanced air mobility, is the umbrella term for flying taxis, e-VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing), urban or regional autonomous aircraft, and the like. Here, too, the industry is engaged at an early stage in terms of ensuring safety while these aircraft — many of which are highly novel in design, materials and aerodynamics — are being certified.
“AAM is the ultimate air taxi, and is clearly on the horizon of most business aviation operators. If all the opportunities that AAM offers materialise, there will be a lot new technologies required that are currently not available, certified or introduced,” Baltus highlights.
Pilotless flying, remote piloting, monitoring-only and remote-monitoring-only concepts are all hot topics, with critical parts of the AAM technology stack still in some cases theoretical or experimental. The size and power of batteries, which pose a different kind of fire risk to conventional fuels, still raise concerns.
To an extent, many of these overlap with hot-button issues in more conventional private aviation: higher-performance datalinks, information security, operational cybersecurity, inflight systems penetrability, and other elements of the connected flightdeck are by no means settled questions.
Author: John Walton
Published 13th April 2023
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