The first day of BASS 2025 is in the books!

Day one focused on the importance of clear communication across aviation, with experts like Doug Carr (NBAA) and Jenny Ann Urban (NATA) stressing how miscommunication can lead to safety risks. Key topics included enhancing communication between pilots, controllers, and leadership to improve overall safety.

Charlie Precourt received the 2025 Business Aviation Meritorious Service Award, and Bryan Burns was honored with the Distinguished Service Award. Tomorrow’s sessions will continue to explore safety, communication, and emerging challenges in aviation.

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BASS 2025 kicked off with a panel that stressed communication at all levels: between captain and first officer, between pilots and controllers, between flight crew and ground crew, and between industry and the public. Doug Carr, senior vice president for safety and international affairs with the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) discussed using data to drive safety improvements. He said the challenge comes in communicating lessons from data to both the flight deck and the corporate boardroom. “Selling safety up” involves convincing corporate leadership that safety investment pays off with lower operational risk, Carr said. He added that industry groups should emphasize that data shows aviation remains the safest mode of transportation.


Communication on the flight line is just as important as that in the boardroom. Jenny Ann Urban, vice president of regulatory affairs with the National Air Transportation Association (NATA), said miscommunication can lead to problems such as misfuelling. What does it mean when a captain says, “Top it off?” she asked.

Phil Hargarten, deputy director of safety and technology with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) addressed how controller shortages worsen communication problems. “It is no secret to anyone in this room that there are serious staffing concerns,” Hargarten said. That means any given controller must handle more traffic, which exacerbates frequency congestion. Hargarten added that another kind of communication — self-reporting of errors through the Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP) — has brought a sea change in safety culture.

Mike Ginter, with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) moderated the panel. Ginter is senior vice president of the AOPA Air Safety Institute. He said the accident rate in general aviation has trended down for three decades. “All we can do is keep pushing out the helpful content,” Ginter said, to get pilots to ask themselves the right questions. Those questions include: Have I been making unstable approaches? Have I been coming in too fast?

The president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, Dr. Hassan Shahidi, presented awards to two aviation leaders. Former astronaut and space shuttle commander Charlie Precourt received the Foundation’s 2025 Business Aviation Meritorious Service Award. The award cited Precourt’s role as chairman of the Citation Jet Pilots (CJP) safety committee as it developed the CJP Safe to Land initiative to prevent runway excursions. Precourt was also honored for other work that alerted the aviation community about the normalization of deviance — or the acceptance of unsafe or less safe practices.

“The safety stuff works,” Precourt said, noting an improvement in accident and incident rates.

Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF) President and CEO Bryan Burns received the Foundation’s Distinguished Service Award. “Under his leadership, ACSF has grown into a leading voice for operational integrity,” Shahidi said. “As Bryan retires from this role  … we express our deepest gratitude for the impact he’s had on our industry.”

A session on global safety challenges examined the challenge of speaking the same language in an international industry. Terry Yeomans, a program director with the International Business Aviation Council (IBAC), opened by noting different words for the same thing in British and American English. Yeomans leads the IBAC program for the international standard for business aircraft handling. He said operators too often choose service providers based on fuel price. But there are other considerations such as quality of ground handling. “How much is that cheap fuel worth?” he asked. “If we get it wrong, you ain’t going anywhere.”

In the same session, IBAC’s program director for the international standard for business aircraft operations, Andrew Karas, discussed mankind’s oldest form of data sharing — storytelling. “It’s the stories that resonate,” Karas said. He added that stories can highlight systemic issues that need joint solutions with regulators and stakeholders.

The importance of feedback highlighted a session on clear communications and leadership in flight operations. “Listening is the act of hearing a sound and understanding what you hear,” Flightdeck Safety Initiatives founder Patrick Browne said. Aviation personnel should ask questions constantly, Browne added, to make sure the message is understood.

He also noted that the industry spends up to 80 percent of training dollars on technical skills, but up to 80 percent of errors involve human skills — such as communication.

On a similar topic, Pilot2Pilot Communications founder Capt. Nicolaus Dmoch said that after 40 years of training on crew resource management (CRM), the industry keeps facing the same challenges. Not for the reasons one might think, however. The traditional model of poor CRM involves a timid first officer intimidated by a gruff and experienced captain. “Today, the biggest obstacle to pilots speaking up may no longer be an excessive authority gradient,” Dmoch said. Instead, pilots hesitate to speak up for fear of damaging relationships — and that holds true both for captains and first officers.

Gathering peer feedback could offer a better way of improving CRM than observing behavior in the simulator and during line checks, Dmoch said. That’s because pilots could be modifying their behavior when they know they’re being observed.

“We have a perception problem in the industry,” NBC News aviation analyst Capt. John Cox said in a keynote address. Cox said high-visibility accidents during the last four months have created a public perception of aviation risk that is contradicted by the facts. “The facts are on our side,” Cox said. “It’s the perception we gotta deal with.”

As an example, he discussed how the January collision between an airliner and a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport focused attention on other events that normally would not have made news. Go-arounds, a routine maneuver, suddenly became stories.

“I’m a translator,” Cox added. “I translate airplane into English.” That job involves explaining a complex story to a lay audience. “In today’s world, everybody wants the answer in about 15 seconds, and social media will immediately start with conspiracy theories,” Cox said.

Cox’s colleague, NBC aviation and space correspondent Tom Costello, had been scheduled to appear with him. However, weather in the Washington, D.C., area prevented Costello from traveling to Charlotte.

Round-robin safety discussions covered topics including emerging technology, data-driven decision making, communicating safety messages to an organization, and handling weather risks.

The clear communications theme continues with tomorrow’s sessions. Topics include effective communications strategies, bridging cultural divides, training for the “last minute” when time is critical, mental health, cybersecurity, cross-generational considerations, and advanced aviation systems.

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