Flying Service’s ‘100 per cent response rate’ misleading says Hong Kong auditors

The Government Flying Service might have misled the public that it always responded to call-outs by sending aircraft after it excluded 852 declined requests from its figures, according to a report by the audit watchdog.

With the exception of one service in 2010, the service reported that it responded to 100 per cent of all other service call-outs between 2010 and last year.

But the Audit Commission found that the service's controlling officer’s report stated that “the percentage of call-outs responded to figure can always be assumed to be 100 per cent as GFS always makes a response, even if the response is to decline the sortie after examining all factors”.

Weather limitations were cited as the reason for declining call-outs in 81 per cent of the 852 cases; unavailability of crew or aircraft (10 per cent), and others (9 per cent) make up the rest.

The 852 cases accounted for 8 per cent of the total 11,175 cases classified as “responded” in the period.

“The Audit [Commission] considers that the GFS needs to review the guideline as the assumed 100 per cent response rates could give rise to misunderstanding that the GFS had provided flying services for all the requests it received, which was actually not the case,” the report said.