Accident/incident analysis
For many years NLR-ATSI maintains a large database with data related to aviation safety, called the NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database. Air safety data are all data that characterise activities of the air transport system. The NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database is basically a collection of databases containing different types of data. The NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database contains detailed information on accidents and incidents of fixed wing aircraft from 1960 onward. Currently the NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database contains information on more than 34,000 accidents and serious incidents that occurred worldwide.
Besides data on accidents/incidents the NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database contains a large collection of non-accident related data. These data include: airport databases, flight exposure data (hours & flights at the level of airlines, aircraft type, and airports), weather data, fleet data, and more. The NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database is updated frequently using reliable sources including data from official reporting systems, insurance claims, accident investigation boards, aircraft manufacturers, civil aviation authorities and more.

A real unique feature of the NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database is that all the different data sources can be related. This allows quantifying the share of a factor in non-accident data that also was present in an accident. As such the significance of the factor contributing to accidents can be determined. For instance: if one wants to know what risk is involved in flight operations on wet runways the number of accidents on wet runways and the number of operations on wet runways that did not result in an accident should be known. When these numbers are related to the accidents and operations on non-wet runways, the risk of operating on a wet runway can be determined. The NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database allows such an analysis to be conducted.

Through the use of its database, NLR-ATSI has gained valuable experience in analysing safety data. NLR-ATSI has acquired significant knowledge regarding data quality issues and statistical pitfalls.
The NLR-ATSI Air Safety Database is used for many aviation safety projects.

More details and examples on this topic can be found in the Example studies section.