The good news is that the controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) risk for large commercial jets in North America, Western Europe and other developed countries is about 10 times less today. The risk is about 100 less today than it was in 1974, 30 years ago. However, the bad news is that the CFIT risk for many operators in countries in Africa, South America and Asia remains as dismal as it was in 30 years ago! CFIT accidents, because of the high kinetic energy of the aircraft involved, remain a major cause of fatalities. The CFIT risk for regional turbine aircraft with 10 passenger seats or greater was reduced by about 30 times in the U.S. after GPWS was installed in 1993. The U.S. air taxi and feeder cargo CFIT risks (unequipped with GPWS) remains about 75 times worse than current regional turbine operations. The world regional turbine and air taxi CFIT risk remains dismally stuck to the high-risk values of 30 years ago. While we have made some progress reducing the CFIT risk of large commercial jet aircraft operations, the industry has done very little to reduce the CFIT risks for most of the regional turbo-prop and piston air taxi operations worldwide. Table 1 is a tabulation of the average millions of flights per CFIT accident over four decades.
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