NBAA Announces 2026 Flying Safety Award Recipients Ahead of NBAA-BACE Ceremony on October 20
Why It MattersLarge-scale accident-free-hours recognition programs like this one give operators, insurers and maintenance departments a shared, measurable benchmark for tracking safety culture across the business aviation fleet.
What happened
The National Business Aviation Association has announced the recipients of its 2026 Flying Safety Awards, covering the period ending December 31, 2025. The ceremony will take place October 20 on the NBAA-BACE Horizon Stage from 10:30 to 11:00 a.m., immediately following the convention's opening session, The Launch. Pilot, flight instructor, philanthropist and influencer Stephanie Goetz, president and pilot of The Pink Jet, will host the event.
More than 100 companies and flight departments, along with hundreds of operators and other industry personnel, are being recognized for accident-free flying. The recipients span seven categories: Commercial Business Flying, with 14 companies logging 789,268 cumulative hours; Corporate Business Flying, with 141 companies logging 6,601,059 cumulative hours; Maintenance Department Safety, with 175 companies; Pilot Safety Awards, with 305 pilots logging 1,974,004 cumulative hours; Scheduler/Licensed Dispatcher Safety, with 83 recipients; Support Services Safety, with 252 recipients; and Avionics/Maintenance Technician Safety, with 175 recipients.
"Safety is the foundation of everything we do in aviation and it's something that's built flight by flight, decision by decision, over an entire career," Goetz said. NBAA Interim COO Dan Hubbard said safety will be a central focus at this year's NBAA-BACE, with the awards event held on the show's largest exhibit-floor stage at the start of convention week, alongside a lineup of safety-focused events and an exhibit hall showcasing safety technology. The NBAA Flying Safety Awards program was established in 1953 by NBAA's Board of Directors to promote a culture of safety in business aviation. NBAA-BACE takes place October 20–22.
Industry impact & what to watch
Programs like this one function as an industry-wide ledger of accident-free operation, aggregating cumulative flight hours across commercial and corporate operators, maintenance teams, dispatchers and support staff into a single annual accounting. The scale here is notable in its own right: 6,601,059 cumulative hours from corporate business flying alone, alongside 1,974,004 hours logged by 305 individual pilots, gives operators and insurers a dataset to benchmark against rather than relying on anecdotal safety reputations.
Placing the ceremony on the Horizon Stage immediately after the convention's opening session signals that NBAA wants safety recognition treated as a headline element of NBAA-BACE rather than a side event, reinforced by a broader slate of safety programming and a technology-focused exhibit hall during the October 20–22 show.
What remains to be seen is how this year's cumulative-hours totals compare with prior years' awards, since this material covers only the period through December 31, 2025, without a multi-year baseline. The next marker is the October 20 ceremony itself, where the specific named recipients across all seven categories will be made public.
