**6. Conclusions**

It has been highlighted during this research that the opportunity to learn from incidents is not being fully embraced in the aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness managemen<sup>t</sup> segmen<sup>t</sup> of the industry. While the idea of eliminating all incidents is a fallacy, reducing their numbers and potential for harm is a reality. Air travel is on the increase and it is envisaged that current sectors flown will have doubled within the next two decades. If current levels of safety were to remain stagnant with a doubling in activity, twice the current fatality rate would surely not be acceptable. Many people relate safety to freedom from risk and danger [41]. Unfortunately, risk and danger are often ubiquitous in the presence of aircraft maintenance and continuing airworthiness managemen<sup>t</sup> activities. Managing sources of risk and danger is a tall order for some organisations. Document 9859 [42] recognises that '*aviation systems cannot be completely free of hazards and associated risks*'. However, the guidance does acknowledge that as long as the appropriate measures are in place to control these risks, a satisfactory balance between '*production and protection*' can be achieved. Perrow [43] (p. 356) acknowledges that '*we load our complex systems with safety devices in the form of bu*ff*ers, redundancies, circuit breakers, alarms, bells, and whistles*' because no system is perfect.

Detecting and identifying hazards highlighted through incident reporting systems is recommended by ICAO standards and recommended practices as an e ffective means of achieving practicable levels of safe operations. Therefore, objective data mined from a reporting system o ffers the potential to enlighten aviation stakeholders and to illuminate weakness that may be present. Such information can assist with a better understanding of events and augmen<sup>t</sup> mitigating measures against the potential e ffects of these hazards. When incidents occur, this can be an indication of a failure in an organisation's process and/or practice. Because of continuous challenges faced by organisations in the aviation industry, there is still potential to learn from resulting incidents and pre-cursors. The learning is based on the potential new knowledge available from the associated collection, analysis and interventions for these events. E ffective learning can be considered as a successful translation of safety information into knowledge that actively improves the operating environment and helps prevent recurrence of unwelcome events.

The paper features a brief exercise to demonstrate how safety information can be translated into lessons capable of augmenting knowledge within an aircraft maintenance and managemen<sup>t</sup> organisation. To support this, fifteen occurrences drawn from an ECCAIRS incident database portal were analysed. The result of the analysis along with potential causation factors are presented. Additionally, a simple mechanism in support of the delivery of associated safety lessons was developed and is presented in Table 1 above. Integrating the known causal factors with the 'Dirty Dozen' taxonomy which is already associated with this aviation segmen<sup>t</sup> provides a useful template for continuation training in the segment. The emerging incident/occurrence themes related to the featured events are briefly discussed and presented within the document. The publication also introduces a framework that assembles and explains the main elements of an incident within its lifecycle. The purpose of this is to illustrate tacit aspects of an incident that have the potential to augmen<sup>t</sup> learning within the process. In order to leverage the maximum benefit from details of an incident, learning processes must recognise the existence of these event components. There can therefore be a formal approach to gauging the e ffectiveness of learning and a means of identifying underperforming elements of the learning process.

This publication could assist subject organisations with a review of their managemen<sup>t</sup> of incident information when developing continuation training material and learning outcomes.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.C. and K.I.K.; methodology, J.C.; formal analysis, J.C.; investigation, J.C.; validation, J.C and K.I.K.; data curation, J.C.; writing—original draft preparation, J.C. and K.I.K.; writing—review and editing, J.C. and K.I.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
