Accidents and serious incidents deserve very thorough investigations to which significant resources must be devoted. Beyond these serious events, fortunately very rare in aviation, less serious incidents, or other events that could have an impact on safety, occur every day. These events are also exploited to improve aviation safety by ensuring the collection of essential information, risk assessment, classification and analysis.
Obligation to report
The European regulation distinguishes between two types of report: mandatory reports and voluntary reports.
The mandatory nature is established according to the type of event. The lists of events that must be compulsorily reported are established by EU Implementing Regulation 2015/1018.
Aviation professionals are required to report to their employer, whose safety management system must monitor and transfer any occurrence to the DAC. Private pilots and other private individuals can report directly to the DAC as explained below. In exceptional cases, this procedure can also be used by professionals wishing to contact the DAC directly.
The obligation to report mainly concerns incidents. Accidents and serious incidents must be notified without delay to the security investigation authority of the State where the accident or serious incident took place (if the place is unknown or does not belong to any State, e.g. .ex. on the high seas, it must be addressed to the State of registry of the aircraft). In Luxembourg, the security investigation authority is the Administration of technical investigations.
Actions of DAC
Each report is processed by the Security department as follows:
- Database entry
- Check if there is another report concerning the same event in the national database (e.g. reports from a pilot and an air traffic controller): consolidation if necessary
- Risk classification
- Categorization according to one or more "safety issues"
- Validation for sharing with other Member States of the European Union via the European Central Repository (ECR)
Names and other personal data are never saved in the database.