In the summer of 2025, what started as a small, informal conversation between a few carriers has become a groundbreaking working group powered by the Air Charter Safety Foundation. At the beginning of 2026, ACSF formed the Ground Operations Working Group, designed to compare data, incident rates, and ground operations procedures to build recommendations that benefit the entire industry.
This group is comprised of senior operations and safety leaders across sectors, including participation from three of the largest charter and fractional operators in the United States. In conjunction with these participants, FBO companies, insurance brokers and agencies, repair stations, and corporate flight departments have volunteered their time to join this important effort to help remediate ground incidents that cost everyone money, time, and safety margin.
The aim of this group is to confidentially share and collate information across sectors to give a more accurate picture of what types of events are occurring, analyze that information, and provide manual language, training, and recommendations to the broader industry based on their findings.
Ground incidents are among the most preventable and costly events in aviation, yet the industry has historically lacked a centralized mechanism for sharing data across operators and sectors. This working group changes that. By bringing together stakeholders who rarely sit at the same table, the Ground Operations Working Group creates an opportunity to identify patterns that no single organization could see on its own.
Each month, ACSF will share updates on this critical work in our newsletter. As the group’s work matures, findings will be shared with the industry via the newsletter, Safety Spotlight, case studies, and the ACSF Member Resource Exchange.
If you have questions about the working group, its mission, or the ongoing work, please reach out to Working Group Chairperson Patrick Burns, SVP of Flight Operations at Wheels Up (patrick.burns@wheelsup.com), or ACSF Staff Liaison Larry Soles, Director of Operations at ACSF (lsoles@acsf.aero).
ACSF and the entire Ground Operations Working Group are excited to continue this effort and provide the industry with additional tools to combat this growing problem.
