Fact Sheet

Lessons Learned Safety Library

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has established a one-of-a-kind online safety library that teaches “lessons learned” from some of the world’s most historically significant transport airplane accidents — especially how that knowledge can help maintain today’s extraordinary aviation safety record.

Back to the Future

Why study aircraft accidents that happened as long as 40 years ago? The FAA believes many of the lessons learned from these tragedies are timeless, and are relevant to today's aviation community. By learning from the past, aviation professionals can use that knowledge to recognize key factors, and potentially prevent another accident from occurring under similar circumstances, or for similar reasons, in the future.

The FAA’s Lessons Learned library, in its initial release, lists 11 major airplane accidents that made an impact on the way the aviation industry and the FAA conduct business today. The FAA’s goal is to stock the library with 40 more historically significant accidents by the end of 2009.

The 11 selected accidents now in the library are:

• Braniff L-188 (Electra) in Texas (September 29, 1959)
• Northwest L-188 (Electra) in Indiana (March 17, 1960)
• United Viscount 745D in Maryland (November 23, 1962)
• United 727 near Los Angeles (January 18, 1969)
• Eastern L-1011 in Florida (December 29, 1972)
• Continental DC-10 at LAX (March 1, 1978)
• Air Florida 737 at Washington, D.C. (January 13, 1982)
• British Airtours B737 at Manchester, UK (August 22, 1985)
• USAir 737 in Pennsylvania (September 8, 1994)
• ValuJet DC-9 in Florida (May 11, 1996)
• China Airlines 747 near Taipei (May 25, 2002) 

Each accident entry features the accident investigation findings, resulting safety recommendations and subsequent regulatory and policy changes, if any. The entry also includes sections on the unsafe conditions that existed, precursors that pointed to an impending accident, and the basic safety assumptions made during the airplanes’ design, or that led to the airplanes’ continued operation.

Most important, the lessons learned from the investigation are explained in detail, and grouped into relevant technical areas and common themes, such as organizational lapses, human error, flawed assumptions, preexisting failures and unintended consequences of design choices.

Knowledge is Power

The FAA believes that the Lessons Learned library can help foster a culture in which aviation professionals capture and use day-to-day information from certification, maintenance, and operational activities to improve safety. The expected benefits from examining the library include more consistent safety decisions and fewer safety problems caused by breakdowns in communication between design, maintenance and operational organizations.

The Lessons Learned library is at: http://accidents-ll.faa.gov/

Beyond the Tarmac

The model developed to create this Lessons Learned library may have applications beyond airplane accidents. The library format and lesson development process could be valuable to non-aviation disciplines in developing lessons learned for other industries. For example, universities could develop curricula addressing safety training for other occupations, especially in the human factors arena.