All airlines are subject to at least one level of compulsory incident reporting: this normally involves reporting to their national aviation authority those relatively serious events which result in physical harm to people, damage to equipment, or risk to safety.
Less-serious incidents may be reported within an airline in a company scheme. The most sophisticated company-reporting systems are associated with the use of incident databases which can draw on flight-data recorder or quick-access recorder data to confirm and analyse the events: British Airways with its Safety Information System (BASIS), now widely used by other carriers.
A few airlines have either company-confidential incident-reporting systems, or no-blame systems, to encourage aircrews to file on operational events which otherwise might not come to light.
When non-serious incidents are reported on internal company systems, there is no obligation on the airline to pass the information on to any other agency, including the aircraft manufacturer. If the incident was purely operational, the airline may not, in isolation, consider it to be type-specific.
There are some systems enabling airlines to report experiences to central databases: IATA's Safety Information Exchange or the European Regional Airlines Association's voluntary membership reporting system (which uses BASIS for its database). A new, hybrid, no-blame pilot-reporting system, called the airline safety action partnership, is being set up in the USA.
A few countries, such as Australia, the UK, and the UK, have national confidential-reporting systems through which reports are received and de-identified by a third party. The European Union is developing a centralised confidential reporting system.
Source: Flight International
