“U.S. incidents may be increasing, but in my extensive experience, they aren’t in Europe. Given the historically poor level of incident reporting in the U.S., it is much more likely that the level of reporting is increasing. And the caveat there is that once a reporting culture really takes off, you get thousands of reports which sit at a very low level of individual significance. At that point, it is necessary to make sure that routine monitoring systems such as audits are effective enough to preclude much of the opportunity to encounter – and report – matters which should have already been captured and dealt with. And then the reports at even low levels of event ‘severity’ keep coming in.

“Of course, I am not disputing the point about incidents as accident precursors; that’s a given as far as most of us are concerned. The reason why more is learned from accidents than incidents is simply because the depth and breadth of an investigation is proportional to the outcome.

For that reason, one of the real challenges in accident avoidance is effective management of the succession of incident reports which are too minor to warrant investigation on their own but which embody a common theme or themes. I think many people do appreciate these points, but actually implementing the systems you need to foster a continued safety cultureonce you’ve achieved it is more of a challenge.” (Pooley, e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

It should be noted that Goodrich’s comments about the need for good incident reporting were made in a UK-based publication and the article was targeted at repair stations worldwide. While Goodrich’s work yields an estimate in the United States of a 450% increase in incidents since 2000, it is believed that incidents globally are on the increase, and it is more than a reporting convention.