The most effective way to protect the world’s vast store of confidential aviation safety information against court-ordered disclosures that threaten hard-won risk mitigations may be for countries/regions to enact specific laws, says Kenneth P. Quinn, general counsel and secretary, Flight Safety Foundation, and vice chair of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Task Force on Safety Information Protection.1 His presentation during the FSF International Air Safety Seminar in October in Santiago, Chile, summarized key issues the task force has reviewed for two years and its expected finalization of recommendations to ICAO in January 2013.
The aviation industry is not immune to the application of criminal law, Quinn said, and only in recent years has it been possible to argue successfully that judicial authorities should not interfere either in accident investigations under ICAO Annex 13 or in the industry’s voluntary occurrence reporting programs. “We’…
