Defusing the Ramp

This is a 2007 follow-up to an earlier article where ramp damage was quoted at $5 billion in 2003.

• Ramp damage is costing airlines and corporate aviation nearly twice as much as early estimates suggested – nearly $10 billion a year – Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) “data mining” has revealed.
• The reason, says the FSF’s Ground Accident Prevention (GAP) programme analyst, Dr Earl Weener, is that personal injury costs had been “right off the radar” for the airlines, but have now been estimated for the first time at $4.4 billion in addition to the $5 billion cost of aircraft damage repair, downtime and delay.
• Now well into Phase 1 of the three-phase FSF/International Air Transport Association (IATA) GAP programme, Weener has found, using data from the airlines, that early estimates of $5 billion costs of ramp damage are turning out to have been valid.
  Weener and the FSF’s GAP programme head, Bob Vandel, told last week’s FSF/IATA/International Federation of Airworthiness safety seminar in Moscow that aircraft ramp damage costs are reckoned to be $4 billion, and corporate aircraft costs about $1 billion, but personal injury direct and indirect costs amount to about $4.4 billion.
• Airline ramp damage occurs about once every 1,000 flights, but personal injury on the ramp takes place about once every 100 flights, says Weener, driving the direct and indirect costs even higher. The average aircraft downtime involved is 3.5 days and the mean downtime cost is $225,000 per aircraft. For larger airlines, this is the equivalent of having one aircraft in the hangar all year, he points out.

Tags: aircraft ground support equipment, airport, aviation, belt loaders, robotics, sensors, transportation

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