The Art of Accident Classification

The reason we conduct accident investigations and will do so in the future is simple: we wish to gain knowledge about causes; share lessons learned and come up with successful prevention strategies to enhance air transport safety. When accidents are analyzed we search for similarities, common behavioral patterns and threads; if we wish to compare or run statistics we therefore have to come up with some sort of taxonomy. Official accident investigation reports often come with a level of detail that will hide the general picture. The writer (and even less the reader) of a detailed accident investigation report hardly ever draws parallels to other accidents, or puts the event in context with incidents. Often, the sequence of causal factors is therefore either lost in the detail or because the reader is unable to make the connection between multiple reports.