General Aviation Accident Masking Causation Based on the HFACS Model Analysis

China’s general aviation safety accidents are frequent, and the development is in a “safety dilemma”. To explore the masking causation of general aviation accidents in China, 61 general aviation accident/incident investigation reports released by the Civil Aviation Administration of China are used as samples from 2018 to 2022. The human factors of general aviation accidents were classified and analyzed using the HFACS model. Then the chi-square test and odds ratio were used to analyze the correlations between the upper and lower levels of the HFACS model. The results of the analysis showed that: The proportions of inadequate supervision, organizational process vulnerability, mismanagement of resources, and poor organizational climate are significantly higher than other human factors in general aviation safety management; there is a significant association between adjacent levels of HFACS, and the critical causal path of accidents is: poor organizational climate→inadequate supervision →personnel factors→decisionmaking errors. Based on the analysis results, targeted general aviation accident preventive measures are proposed at four levels: organizational impact, unsafe supervision, prerequisites for unsafe behavior, and unsafe behavior.