Anne van Dalen

14 I General Introduction accident of a Flanders Monoplane that crashed at Brooklands Racetrack. This was the first accident to be published. Copies of the report went into widespread circulation and formed the basis of all British and Canadian accident reports in the future. 20 When the First WorldWar began in the summer of 1914, governments considered aircraft pilots not to be circus performers anymore, but spies in the sky. Because of the war, aviation and consequently safety, matured almost overnight. First, the only instrument the pilot had was his wristwatch to measure flight times for navigation and fuel consumption. By 1915, other instruments started to appear in the cockpit, such as a compass, a tachometer, fuel and oil pressure gauges, and on experimental basis a radio. In 1915, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) formed an Aircraft Inspection Department, dedicated solely to accident investigation. Post-war, the hearts and minds of the public, government and investors had to be convinced that flying was actually a safe, reliable and even a profitable mean of transport. Consequently, the war brought standard operating procedures and most importantly, pilot training. 20 To date, more than 100.000 flights a day, well and truly, are safely executed. If you consider non-commercial flights, that will be about 50 million flights per year. The chances of a plane being involved in a fatal accident is now one in 16 million. The year 2017 was the safest year for aviation ever, which reports only two fatal accidents, both involving small turbo-prop aircraft, with a total of 13 lives lost. 24,25 The safety levels that civil aviation has achieved over this short period is remarkable and almost impeccable. History of the aviation black box The aviation industry (flight and cockpit data recorder), offshore oil platforms and maritime transport (voyage data recorder) have been successfully using Black Boxes and mechanisms to proactively analyse suboptimal situations and ‘errors’ for quite some time. 26 Cockpit voice and data recorders, were originally developed between 1930 and 1950 to monitor the testing of experimental aircrafts. Today’s solid-state data recorders store thousands of perimeters, few of which will ever be used in actual accident analysis. Most help schedule maintenance, anticipate technology failures, and optimize system performance. Voice recordings are now added and continue to provide a view into the