Liberty’s aviation safety director receives top collegiate safety award

Liberty University School of Aeronautics Director of Safety Andrew Walton was awarded the John K. Lauber Safety Award at the University Aviation Association’s 2022 Conference, held Oct. 5-7 in Colorado Springs, Colo., recognizing his contributions toward improving safety in flight training. The annual award recognizes the contributions of an individual who has improved safety in aviation.

Walton said he accepted the award on behalf of the university, honoring his mentors and peers.

“It is an individual award, but it reflects a commitment to safety that exists throughout the School of Aeronautics, and it is a credit to our Dean (Dr. Rick Roof), it’s a credit to our Provost (Dr. Scott Hicks), and it is a credit to the senior administration of Liberty University,” Walton said.

He noted that Liberty has invested tremendously in the aviation program’s safety measures by installing state-of-the-art technology in its simulation center and on its fleet of 22 Cessna Skyhawks 172 and five Piper Seminole twin-engine training aircraft.

He said it’s important to take a research, data-driven perspective to safety-risk management. In his own research, Walton has assessed the risk of mid-air collisions as the second greatest in flight training behind loss of control in flight. He asked Liberty’s administration to enhance safety by spending $160,000 to equip its planes with systems that give pilots visual and audio alerts of other aircraft.

“That specific project was highlighted by the FAA in its publications to try to encourage other operators to be proactive toward safety and get that mid-air collision technology into the cockpit,” Walton said.

School of Aeronautics Residential Chair Dr. Mitchell Morrison, who formerly served as the chief of aviation safety for the U.S. Coast Guard, wrote one of Walton’s letters of recommendation for the safety award.

“Andrew Walton is a singularly outstanding leader who has brought Liberty’s aeronautics safety program to the forefront in collegiate aviation,” Morrison said. “Under his leadership, we have implemented a robust community of aviation safety leadership that has transformed the safety culture of our school, through proactive reporting and detailed analysis of digital data. He’s a recognized national-level expert in general aviation accident trends analysis.”

Recently, Walton’s primary focus in advancing safety in the flight training program has involved monitoring flight data.

“We were an early adopter of the FAA’s National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID),” he said. “We take the second-by-second flight data logs that we have for all of our airplanes and we put that into a large database that sifts through that to look for outliers.”

Walton collaborated with several aeronautics students, including members of the National Intercollegiate Flying Association (NIFA) flight team, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s (AOPA) Air Safety Institute for research into Instructional Flight Accidents that was eventually published through AOPA in 2019.

“The student research component helped our flight team win the American Airlines safety award for three years in a row at NIFA Nationals,” Walton said. “We found that loss of control in flight — an industry-defined category of accident mostly due to aerodynamic stalls — made up more than half of the relevant flight-training accidents in our 16-year data set.”

The team at Liberty and AOPA is currently updating the study to expand the range of relevant flight-training accidents from 2000 through the end of 2019.

“The good news there is that we’ve seen the accident rate come down over the last 20 years in our industry,” Walton said. “We are getting safer as the FAA and flight schools and others focus on ways of improving flight training safety.”

Walton has served in his current role since 2010. Two emphases of his day-to-day job are encouraging students and instructors to submit voluntary safety reports and report hazards or scenarios that could be safety risks as well as inspire a culture and mindset of safety.

“We want to be good stewards of our resources and certainly our people,” Walton said. “We are training champions as they are going into the aerospace industry, and we want to equip, mentor, and send them out with a mindset of safety that they are going to take into the industry. That goal of sending out others to make a difference in the industry is really encouraging to see.”

The UAA safety committee nominated Walton to serve as its chair to foster collaboration between universities and plan next year’s conference.

“I love talking about safety,” Walton said. “I feel like I’ve found my niche, and I really enjoy it. I feel God has really blessed me to be a part of the team here at Liberty and it has been an honor to work alongside a team of aviation professionals.”