*7.3. Future Work*

Future work will utilize all the collated maintenance accidents from the ASN database (of which there are approximately 360, spanning 1940 to 2019), to see if all accidents with maintenance contributions are di fferent to those captured in the o fficial ICAO accident dataset. This will also require a comparison to the ASN dataset as a population, rather than the ICAO dataset. This will enable all of the properties in this study to be expanded beyond the scheduled commercial large transport category aircraft operations captured by the ICAO o fficial accident statistics. Many of the limitations will be overcome with this larger data set, presenting even further opportunities for future work.

The other follow up question that remains unanswered is the proportion of incidents with a maintenance contribution or causation. The hypothesis is that a much higher percentage of incidents could be the result of maintenance issues, which are rectified before they become accidents. Many readers will have experienced either personally or professionally a delay at the gate because of 'technical issues'. While maintenance personnel are clearly fixing technical issues, the topic of this work demonstrates that they also cause other technical issues, but how many? To answer this question requires an all-encompassing dataset with narrative information available to search for maintenance issues.
