Not All Aviation Safety Events Are Accidents: Differentiating an Incident from an Accident and Why It Is Important.
- Malcolm Lai
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Safety language affects public perception, and said perception has commercial and institutional consequences. The nuances between their definitions can directly affect how the common Joe initially perceives an event's severity.
Unless you're a safety professional or someone deeply fascinated by analysing air crash investigations, the difference between an incident and an accident wouldn’t really bother you much. In much of the journalism in articles published around the world, aviation safety events are often labelled according to perceived severity rather than by a formal benchmark. If the event involves death, serious injury or catastrophic damage to the machine, it is usually described as an accident. Anything less severe is often described as an incident.
And we can’t blame them; the average reader pays more attention to the substance of a story than to the technical precision of its headline. In today’s media environment, however, that may no longer be the case, as headlines carry more weight than ever before.
Average Screen Attention Duration
Sustained focus on a single screen-based task
Digital attention to screen-based tasks has declined sharply, with Gloria Mark’s research finding that average attention on a screen fell from about 150 seconds in 2004 to 75 seconds in 2012, and more recent studies suggesting about 47 seconds. That represents a decline of almost 69% from the 2004 figure. Kadence, citing wider news-consumption research, says 63% of US adults often read only the headlines of news stories shared on social media.
It also cites research suggesting that 47% of respondents have shared news stories on social media without reading beyond the headline. Therefore, the words used in a headline may be the only part of the story many readers process, which means the classification of a safety event should describe it as accurately as the available facts allow, without exaggerating or underplaying it.
Definitions of an Accident, Serious Incident, and Incident
The industry standard we will reference is Annex 13 of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), titled Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation. ICAO is the United Nations specialised agency that sets the global baseline for civil aviation through the Chicago Convention framework. Its annexes contain Standards and Recommended Practices, or SARPs, across areas such as personnel licensing, operations, airworthiness, air traffic services, aerodromes, dangerous goods and safety management. Annex 13 is the part of that architecture that deals with the notification, investigation, and reporting of aircraft accidents and incidents. Under Annex 13, an accident is an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft in which at least one of three threshold outcomes is met:
A person is fatally or seriously injured;
the aircraft sustains damage or structural failure that adversely affects its strength, performance or flight characteristics and would normally require major repair or replacement;
the aircraft is missing or completely inaccessible.
The definitions also contain exclusions. These include engine failure or damage, when the damage is limited to a single engine (including its cowlings or accessories), to propellers, wing tips, antennas, probes, vanes, tires, brakes, wheels, fairings, panels, landing gear doors, windscreens, the aircraft skin (such as small dents or puncture holes), or for minor damages to main rotor blades, tail rotor blades, landing gear, and those resulting from hail or bird strike (including holes in the radome).
An incident sits below that threshold. Annex 13 defines it as an occurrence, other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft which affects or could affect the safety of operation. “A serious incident is an incident” involving circumstances indicating that there was a high probability of an accident and associated with the operation of an aircraft which, in the case of a manned aircraft, takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight until such time as all such persons have disembarked, or in the case of an unmanned aircraft, takes place between the time the aircraft is ready to move with the purpose of flight until such time as it comes to rest at the end of the flight and the primary propulsion system is shut down.
ICAO’s own note (Note 1, under the definition of a Serious Incident) tells us that the difference between an accident and a serious incident lies solely in the result. A near-collision requiring an avoidance manoeuvre, controlled flight into terrain narrowly avoided, or an attempted landing on a closed runway may all be serious incidents even when the aircraft lands safely.
Differentiating is important
“If every headline is calling every runway excursion, hard landing, tail strike, or landing gear event an “accident, " it may produce clicks and outrage which in turn drives higher viewership for the article, but it may also flatten the risk picture.”Lower-consequence events will sound more severe than they are, while genuinely high-consequence events become harder to distinguish from normal operations. The reader is left trying to judge whether an aircraft was substantially damaged, whether people were seriously injured, or whether the event was a near miss; one blunt word doing the work of several categories
The opposite problem exists too. The word “incident” is commonly used in other industries as an umbrella term for almost any safety event. In occupational health and safety, for example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 45001 uses “incident” to describe an occurrence arising out of work that could or does result in injury or ill health. Whereas within the aviation industry, we often use “occurrence” or “event” as an umbrella term to cover accidents and lower-severity events of safety significance.
The simple solution: For aviation educators like us at YourSafetyPilot (although sometimes I believe we are at best, informants) and other media accounts, that taxonomy is something worth retaining. “Occurrence” is the neutral opening word. “Incident” can be appropriate once the available facts show that the event affected, or could have affected, safety of operation without meeting the accident threshold. “Serious incident” should be reserved for cases where an accident was highly probable and avoided mainly through outcome rather than benign risk. “Accident” should be used when the Annex 13 consequences are met or when the investigating authority has classified it that way.
In any case, following Annex 13 is a good and objective way of classification.
Any reported safety event that is publicly published is perceived as a negative
Any article with a headline containing the words “incident” or “accident” is likely to be read negatively by someone unfamiliar with aviation safety reporting. Take the following hypothetical headline:
“Cadet pilot treated at hospital after hitting his head on an aircraft”
Most people may see this as a direct reflection of the flight school involved, or as evidence that pilot standards have declined. We dwell on what our minds prefer to hear, and we end up missing out on the countless things that went right. For example, the pilot assessed his own fitness, recognised that he was no longer fit to fly, and reported it. That is indicative of a flight school that had successfully created a psychologically safe culture, in which he felt secure enough to report a seemingly embarrassing mistake. Admitting that mistake would set him back relative to his peers, but the safety culture and ownership were so strong that self-reporting was a better decision to make. These details provide a truer account of the event, yet the public often overlooks them because they are less dramatic than the headline. Why do humans instinctively perceive events this way?
There is a psychological reason for that reaction. Humans tend to give greater weight to negative information, especially when it involves personal safety, authority or institutional competence. A headline about a pilot being treated at a hospital activates the availability heuristic: people judge the seriousness of an event partly by how easily vivid examples or associations come to mind. In context, those associations often involve danger, poor standards or organisational failure. The mind prefers a simple causal story in the face of uncertainty. A reported safety event can therefore be read more easily as evidence that something has gone wrong, even when the same event may also point to a healthy reporting culture and a functioning safety system.
Sources:International Civil Aviation Organisation. (2024). Annex 13 — Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation (13th ed.). ICAO.
International Civil Aviation Organization. (n.d.). Annex 13 — Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation.
International Civil Aviation Organization. (n.d.). Standards and Recommended Practices.
SKYbrary Aviation Safety. (n.d.). Safety Occurrence Reporting.
International Organization for Standardization. (2018). ISO 45001:2018 — Occupational health and safety management systems — Requirements with guidance for use.
University of California. (2023, May 11). Can’t pay attention? You’re not alone.
Mark, G. (n.d.). Attention span.
Swiss German University. (2026, February 2). The decline of attention span in the digital era.
Kadence International. (n.d.). From headlines to hyperlinks: The shifting dynamics of news consumption and trust.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.
Pilat, D., & Krastev, S. (n.d.). The availability heuristic. The Decision Lab.
About the author: Malcolm Lai is a Singapore-based private pilot and founder of YourSafetyPilot, an aviation safety education initiative focused on making safety concepts practical and accessible for pilots and aviation professionals. He holds a Diploma in Aviation Management and has experience in safety, quality, and compliance within a flight-training organisation, including work on safety management systems, culture, and performance. Malcolm previously served as President of the Singapore Youth Flying Club Alumni Association and is currently co-writing a book on aviation safety while conducting research about safety performance indicators for general aviation flight schools.
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