General aviation
General aviation (abbr.
GA) is one of the two categories of
civil aviation.
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A general aviation scene at Kemble airfield, England. The aircraft in the foreground is a homebuilt Vans RV-4 |
The term
general aviation describes any flight other than a
military or
scheduled airline flight, ranging from
gliders and
powered parachutes to large, non-scheduled cargo jet flights. As a result, the majority of the world's air traffic falls into this category, and the vast majority of the world's airports serve general aviation exclusively.
The following examples provide a partial list of typical general aviation operations:
*
airship*
flight training*
gliding*
parachuting*
aerobatics* privately-owned
light aircraft*
air ambulance* pipeline surveys
*
aerial photography* traffic reporting
*
crop dusting*
bush flying*
balloon (aircraft)*
air charter including air taxi operations
*
many air cargo flights*
business jets* police air patrols
*
forest fire fighting* logging
* resource exploration
Since it includes both (non-scheduled) commercial operations and private operations, with aircraft of many different types and sizes, it is not possible to make blanket statements about the regulation or safety record of general aviation. At one extreme, in most countries business jets and large cargo jets face most of the same regulations as
scheduled air transport and fly mostly to the same airports, so it is not surprising that they have comparable safety records. Commercial
bush flying operations normally do not operate under as heavy a regulatory burden and often involve riskier operations into small airports or off-airport outside of
radar coverage; as a result, the safety record in that sector can be considerably worse — bush pilots in
Alaska, for example, have a one in eight chance of dying on the job.[
1] Most other sectors of general aviation fall between these extremes, depending on the environments in which they operate.
