Fatalities in General Aviation: From Balloons to Helicopters

General Aviation (GA) has shown the highest proportion of accidents and fatalities in aviation. The countries with the highest number of GA flights (USA, UK, and Australia) all show high accident rates for this category. The developments in the approaches to aviation safety, in particular in relation to GA, show an increasing understanding of the determining factors of fatalities and the most promising strategies to prevent them.Occurrences in aviation that involve fatalities are universally classified as accidents. Accidents are in contrast with incidents, which only feature minor injury and minor damage to the aircraft. Accident statistics have dominated the study of aviation safety and have benefitted from new approaches from organizational psychology. The relevance of these approaches to GA accident investigations is limited due to the highly diversified operations and the limited organizational structure of this industry.