Citation

Gao Y, Hao Y, Wang S, Wu H. Safety Sci. 2021; 141: e105351.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105351

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Since 1975, the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) has collected over 1.6 million reports from aviation community members and contributed to the efficiency and safety improvement of the National Airspace System (NAS) of the United States. Despite a large number of studies using ASRS data, the dynamics between safety reporting and aviation accidents remains unclear. Focusing specifically on the Part 121 air carriers of the U.S., this paper addresses the temporal relationship between voluntary safety reporting and the occurrence of commercial aviation accidents. Due to the uncertain and potentially mixed order of integration of the time-series data, this study uses Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing and a special Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model based on Toda and Yamamoto (1995) for data analysis and cross-validation of the results. The ARDL bounds testing finds a long-run relationship from aviation accidents to safety reporting. This finding is confirmed by the estimation results of the VAR model that aviation accidents Granger cause voluntary safety reporting. Short-run relationships identified in ADRL bounds testing and impulse-response function (IRF) of the VAR model reveal that the response of safety reporting to aviation accidents peaks in the 4th and 5th quarter after the occurrence of accidents. Understanding the inter-temporal relationship between safety reporting and aviation accidents could facilitate the interpretation of reporting data for government agencies or safety departments of airlines overseeing safety reporting systems. The short-run and long-run relationships between voluntary safety reporting and aviation accidents identified in this study for U.S. air carriers could be used as benchmarks for other national aviation safety agencies or airlines to assess their safety reporting cultures.

Language: en

Keywords

Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing; Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS); Time-series causal inference; Vector Autoregressive (VAR)