Learning from incidents in aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness: regulation, practice and gaps

Purpose The ability to learn from previous events in support of preventing future similar events is a valuable attribute of aviation safety systems. A primary constituent of this mechanism is the reporting of incidents and its importance in support of developing learning material. Many regulatory requirements clearly define a structure for the use of learning material through organisational and procedural continuation training programmes. This paper aims to review aviation regulation and practice, highlighting the importance of learning as a key tenet of safety performance. Design/methodology/approach Applicable International Civil Aviation Organisation requirements and the European Union (EU) regulation in aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness management have been critically reviewed through content analysis. Findings This review has identified gaps in the European implementing rules that could be addressed in the future to support a more effective approach to the delivery of lessons in the aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness management sector. These include light-touch of learning and guidance requirements, lack of methodologies for the augmentation of safety culture assessment, absence of competence requirements for human factors trainers and lack of guidance on standardised root-cause analyses. Practical implications This paper offers aviation safety practitioners working within the European Aviation Safety Agency regulatory regime an insight into important matters affecting the ability to learn from incidents. Originality/value This paper evaluates critically and independently the regulation and practice that can affect the ability of EU regulated aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness management organisations to learn from incidents. The outputs from this research present a fresh and independent view of organisational practices that, if left unchecked, are capable of impeding the incident learning process.

Analysis of Continuing Airworthiness Occurrences under the Prism of a Learning Framework

In this research paper fifteen mandatory occurrence reports are analysed. The purpose of this is to highlight the learning potential incidents such as these may possess for organisations involved in aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness management activities. The outputs from the mandatory occurrence reports are aligned in tabular form for ease of inclusion in human factors’ continuation training material. A new incident learning archetype is also introduced, which intends to represent how reported incidents can be managed and translated into lessons in support of preventing event recurrence. This ‘learning product’ centric model visually articulates activities such as capturing the reported information, establishing causation and the iterative nature of developing a learning product.