Over the last four years, according to the studies found by the Federal Aviation Administration, there has been an increased of near accidents that have occurred in the air. In fact in just these four short years, the numbers have increased by a total of 600 percent, meaning that far too many lives are being endangered as a result of these people choosing to get too close for comfort when they are in the sky. Fortunately for travelers who are reading this article, studies do still show that the United States still has the highest safety rating in the world when it comes to traveling by the air. Despite this encouraging fact, investigators are still seeing that close call accidents are simply happening too often, and they are not sure why that is.

One of the possible causes for the increase in almost accidents may be related to the number of budget cuts that have taken place in out country which are greatly affecting the aviation world. Air traffic controllers are among those who are suffering from these cuts. Our country has seen a number of air accidents within the past month, one of them killing two students from across the world as they were landing in San Francisco, another 180 people were injured. As a result of this accident, investigators from the FAA have taken serious action in order to prevent these instances from occurring again. One of the more strict measures they are now enforcing is in regards to how many hours the pilots are required to have of airtime before they are allowed to operate the planes that are used for either U.S. passenger planes or for cargo. Rather than the original time requirement of 250 hours for captains and first officer pilots, they will now be required to have at least 1,500 before they are given the responsibility to care for so man lives.

According to Jeffery Guzzetti, the assistant inspector general with the Transportation Department, he claims that a lot of the blame for these close calls falls on the air traffic controllers who are simply not giving the pilots and their planes enough room in between the planes. He claims that in 2009 there was only 37 reported incidents of close call accidents, where as in the year of 2012 there were 275 reports near collisions. It is likely that some of the increase has to do with the consistency of people who are now charting their errors or reporting near collisions rather than trying to keep it hidden. However, due to there being many who don’t want to report these accidents that could have happened, the FAA fears that the number of near misses may be significantly larger than they thought.

The inspector general addresses the very concern of safety for hose that are in the air, and in response, they are committing to address the shortages in the field in order to improve air safety. Just to get an example of how badly these budget cuts have affected everyone, in the beginning of 2012, there were over 300 investigators in the agency who were responsible for researching the near collisions in the air. Because of budget that is affecting us now, the FAA claims that there are 16 personnel as of this February on staff. The FAA is in need of more air safety inspectors as well, which will be something they are fighting for in the near future in hopes of preventing more fatal aviation accidents from occurring.

If you or a loved one has been injured in a plane crash, find a personal injury lawyer near you!