INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESPONSE NATA Safety 1st Cleaning Standard Safeguards Employees, Clients, and Corporate Assets by Michael France 2020 has brought with it an unprecedented level of challenges for the business aviation community. The onset of COVID-19 forced the industry to all-but-completely stop, with levels of opera- tion anecdotally down 75% to 95%. The National Air Transportation Association (NATA) has been working diligently through these times, and as the world begins to open up again, to aid business aviation in maintaining safe and successful operations. COVID-19 has highlighted an entirely new dimension of the meaning of “safety,” shining a light on how critical the prevention of the spread of infec- tious disease is to public safety and the world economy. NATA’s Safety 1st program is the trusted name in safety for business aviation ground handling and is cur- rently in use at over 1,600 locations globally. With the threat of COVID-19, it became clear that Safety 1st would need to adapt and expand in response. Therefore, it was with pleasure that NATA released Safety 1st Clean in June 2020—a trustworthy infectious disease response clean- ing standard for Fixed Base Operators (FBOs). “The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world brought the entire aviation industry to a grinding halt in a way that many of us were unprepared for,” stated NATA Senior Vice President Ryan Waguespack. “As flight activities continue to increase, NATA felt it was critical to develop and provide Safety 1st Clean for free to the entire business aviation community to maintain safe and suc- cessful operations moving forward and to be better pre- pared for future outbreaks. Since its release, it has been excellent to see so many companies adopt the standard.” The Safety 1st Clean standard is free to the public and produced by the NATA Safety Committee and COVID Task Force to provide general guidance on facility clean- ing, disinfecting, and facility operations in response to a 12 pandemic. The goal of this standard is to safeguard FBO team members, corporate assets, and the general flying public. The standard also provides a self-certification pro- cess that allows FBOs to highlight their conformance to this standard by displaying the Safety 1st Clean logo. Upon completing the self-certification checklist (found in Appendix A), an FBO can send it and other required documentation outlined in the document to [email protected] to receive the Safety 1st Clean logo. Documentation of completion of Safety 1st Clean must also be made available to FBO clients upon request. NATA and its membership are committed to helping mitigate the risk of the spread of contagious diseases, but also understand that no cleaning and disinfecting stan- dard is fail-safe. This standard represents industry best practices and government agency guidance. Safety 1st Clean can be achieved through the additional safety pro- tocols and programs our members have put in place. NATA is pleased to present the Safety 1st Clean stan- dard and self-certification checklist on the subsequent pages of the Aviation Business Journal. Within the first few weeks of launch, more than 100 locations self-certified as Safety 1st Clean. “The NATA team is very pleased to see how quickly Safety 1st Clean is gaining traction across the industry and throughout the world, with locations in Canada, Singapore, and Australia among the first to adopt the standard,” stated NATA Senior Vice President Ryan Waguespack. We are confident that even more locations will realize the immense value in using Safety 1st Clean to confirm their own heightened standards in cleaning and disinfecting during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.” Aviation Business Journal | Summer 2020
