TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Synthesis 95: Airport Incident Reporting Practices focuses on current practices for defining, collecting, aggregating, protecting, and reporting airport organizational incident information.

The report is designed to assist those airport operators seeking to understand the nature of airport incident reporting and its importance for organizational learning and effectiveness, risk management, operational safety, and worker safety.

An incident reporting system can be utilized to flag or provide potential early warning of drifts in actions toward a stated goal or an adverse event or loss.

When discussing incident reporting, reference is made to safety, hazards, indicators, performance, enterprise risk management, culture, climate, and other related terms. However, there does not exist universal agreement as to what constitutes an incident. For this reason, the report takes a broad approach to incident reporting in organizations. It views incident reporting as a means to improve airport organizations through the analysis of data. With data, better-informed and higher quality decision-making can be exercised.