As an airline parts distributor, we’re concerned with inventory. If you’ve read the Kapco Global blog post on supply chain management, you know that a big part of our business involves keeping the steady stream of necessary aircraft repair, maintenance and upgrade parts flowing without interruption or bottleneck.
We help some of the biggest commercial airlines in the business maintain adequate stock of the parts they need and use regularly, and we make sure the “one-off’s” are delivered on time and on deadline. To do this well, we keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in our industry. We monitor changes to FAA regulations; we keep detailed records regarding fleet age and scheduled maintenance requirements; we pay attention to travel trends, weather events and industry-wide developments on a global scale. We strive to always be one step ahead of our clients—using our research and forty years of experience and recordkeeping to anticipate their needs. The result is a company with worldwide distribution capabilities and an unbeatable reputation for excellence.
But all bell-ringing aside, sometimes we just like to have a little fun geeking out on the numbers—because as Dale Carnegie says, “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” And that’s how and why we created the infographic: “Airplane Safety Equipment—A View From the Top.”
Recently, we were looking at air traffic data from the National Air Traffic Controllers (NATC) Association, via the sos.noaa.gov website, and we thought that the numbers would tell a compelling visual story about what’s going on in the skies above the United States in a single day. Then we got to thinking—with 87,000 aircraft per day, that’s a lot of safety equipment being ferried around above our heads. But we didn’t know how much, because it appeared that no one had crunched those numbers…yet.
So that’s what we did. Because we’ve been supplying safety gear to the airline industry for decades, we thought it would be interesting and quasi-relevant to our business, to figure out approximately how much of this type of equipment is flying around US skies at any given time. And as we expected, from crash axes, to first aid kits, to emergency slides and locator beacons, the lengths that the aviation industry goes to ensure the safety of its passengers and staff is impressive.
Because this was an exercise in entertainment more than anything else, we kept the math strictly to the “back of the napkin” variety, but to be as accurate as possible, our conclusions were guided by FAA required equipment regulations that were then averaged out for aircraft size.
We hope you like the graphic and we encourage you to share it far and wide. If you’d like more information about the safety equipment that Kapco distributes, please take a look at our product guide. We work with the industry’s very best suppliers, to ensure you have what you need.
P.S. The NATC Flight Explorer provides a real time snapshot of all the air traffic occurring at any given moment across the U.S.—it’s an impressive visual of our busy skies, and we encourage you to take a look.
For more information on the safety equipment regulations for U.S. aircraft, please visit the following webpages:
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC121-33B.pdf
https://flightsafety.org/ccs/ccs_nov-dec03.pdf
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1994-12-02/html/94-29822.htm
https://www.transtats.bts.gov/
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