ICAO has indicated an improvement in the proportion of accidents for which a final investigation report has been published, but has further underlined the importance of completing inquiries quickly and transparently.
Three-quarters of final reports for investigations completed over 2017-22 had been published by 2024, the organisation has disclosed in its latest global aviation safety report.
ICAO has been reviewing fatal accidents over the last decade in order to improve the timeliness and release rate of final investigation reports.
It had found that barely 40% of fatal accidents occurring over 1990-2016, involving civil aircraft with a maximum take-off weight above 5.7t, had a publicly-available final report available – and that the average interval to publication was more than four years.
This interval reduced to around 20 months for 2017-22, says ICAO, and 76% of the final reports for inquiries completed in this period had been published by last year.
ICAO discovered, during its review, that some states had opted not to carry out an investigation of accidents considered to be outside of the organisation’s Annex 13 criteria – such as those involving government flights.
“The percentage of final reports published compared to investigations completed would be further increased if taking this into account,” says ICAO.
It points out that Annex 13 requires investigators to make a final report publicly available within 12 months, if possible, and to send this report to ICAO for inclusion in its central database. Such reports, it adds, are the “foundation for initiating the safety actions which are necessary to prevent further accidents from similar causes”.
ICAO’s newly-published safety report shows that the global accident rate increased to 2.56 per million departures last year, higher than the 2023 ratio of 1.87. But it remained below the 2.94 level of pre-pandemic 2019, despite the number of flight departures almost fully recovering to 2019’s figure of 38.8 million.
