Air transport safety, civil aviation: prevention of accidents, collect and dissemination of information

PURPOSE : to create the necessary legal framework to collect and disseminate information on aviation incidents in order to produce a safer system. CONTENT : the general objective of this proposal is to contribute to the improvement of air safety by ensuring that safety critical information is reported and collected, stored, protected and disseminated in order to facilitate its effective analysis and monitoring. A network of national mandatory occurrence reporting systems will be based on the ECCAIRS (European Co-ordination Centre for Aviation Incident Reporting System) system developed by the Joint Research Centre in Ispra and the creation of confidential reporting systems on regional or sub-regional basis will be supported, providing they comply with Commission's operational requirements. To recall, the first piece of Community legislation specific to air transport was a Directive of 1980 on accident investigation. It then adopted its communication on 'Community initiatives concerning civil aviation incidents and accidents'. Which suggested a policy to prevent accidents by launching initiatives in three areas: accident investigation, mandatory occurrence reports and confidential reporting systems. The adoption of a Directive on accident and investigation in November 1994 was the first definitive achievement of this policy. However, the limitations of this approach was mainly that, as the number of accidents is fortunately very low, the opportunities to learn from them are limited and that lessons are drawn only after a tragedy has already happened. It is now proposed to complement this first initiative with a more proactive one that will address both mandatory and confidential reporting of incidents, defects or malfunctions which may constitute a hazard for civil aviation operations, called under the generic term of "occurrences". Therefore, it is the aim of this proposal to establish a Community mandatory reporting scheme to collect, record, exchange and disseminate information on hazardous or potentially hazardous occurrences. In this way, the Civil Aviation Authorities and persons or organisations having an influence on air safety may learn from them and an assessment of the safety implications of each occurrence can be made. �