Protecting Safety Data

Over the past several years, Flight Safety Foundation has been pretty vocal on the broad topic of criminalization of human error. Things have been quiet on that front lately, so I thought I should provide an update. The focus of our recent efforts has been on the legal protection of safety information. Increasingly, voluntarily provided safety information is being used in court cases, sometimes even trivial cases, and surrendered to the general news media under freedom of information requests. We are not talking about the usual states with lax protections; we are talking about advanced aviation nations like Canada and the United Kingdom. These disclosures are not headline-grabbing events. They are quiet court rulings that don’t get much notice. But that is what makes us nervous. It is one thing to see confidential information disclosed in the emotional turmoil following a major accident; it is another to see it being casually offered up by the courts in the normal course of bu…