OT Safety Bulletin

Incident Reports

Over the last few weeks some interesting incident reports have been published. As with many aviation incidents these usually do the rounds of the world’s media at the time of the incident and the sensational high level points then later appear when the formal reports are published. The media are generally looking for someone to blame and those who work in aviation are looking to learn. Sometimes many of those valuable learning points that may be relevant to your operation are buried within the detail of the report.

Accident investigators are rightly free to examine anything whilst conducting an investigation. The role of an air accident investigator increasingly places demands to draw on wider and wider skill sets. So after reading a report there can be a number of unanswered questions, but there is still value in reviewing and discussing these.

A couple of recent reports highlighted some interesting points, and although not necessarily directly related, triggered fresh reminders of past experiences.

• Report 1 - accident to B747-400 at O.R. Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg

• Report 2 - accident to Airbus A319-131 at London Heathrow Airport