Occurrence Reporting in Civil Aviation: Initial Appraisal of the European Commission's Impact Assessment

This note seeks to provide an initial analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the European Commission's Impact Assessment accompanying the proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on occurrence reporting in civil aviation. The proposal aims at revising Directive 2003/42/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2003 on occurrence reporting in civil aviation and its implementing regulations. The IA provides an extensive and comprehensive overview of the occurrence reporting obligations in current European legislation in Annex 6 (p. 37). An 'occurrence' in civil aviation is defined in Article 2(1) of Directive 2003/42/EC as 'an operational interruption, defect, fault or other irregular circumstance that has or may have influenced flight safety and that has not resulted in an accident or serious incident ...'. Directive 2003/42/EC requires each Member State to set up a mandatory occurrence reporting system. The reported occurrences are stored and sent to the European Central Repository (ECR).