An air crash report is not a verdict, and the rules that govern it forbid it from becoming one

by Arjun Mehta · September 9, 2026

Science & Technology Writer, The Globe Ledger

Within hours of any airliner accident, two questions are asked in public: what happened, and whose fault was it. The international system built to answer the first is expressly forbidden from answering the second. That is not a gap in the rules. It is the rule.

The framework rests on a single sentence in the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation. Article 26 provides, in the wording ICAO reproduces in its own public guidance, that "the State in which the accident occurs will institute an inquiry into the circumstances of the accident." Everything else — who may take part, what must be published, what the report may and may not be used for — is set out in Annex 13 to that Convention, Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation.

Annex 13 is not a treaty in the ordinary sense. It is a body of Standards and Recommended Practices adopted under the Convention rather than a text separately negotiated and ratified by states, and it changes by amendment rather than by protocol. The ICAO Store listing for the Annex gives the current edition as the thirteenth, dated July 2024 and incorporating Amendment 20; that listing, rather than the text itself, is the authority for the edition cited here. That matters when reading older commentary: paragraph numbers and definitions in Annex 13 have moved between editions, and a citation to an earlier edition may no longer describe the provision in force.

The Annex itself is a priced publication and its full text is not freely available online, so this account relies on two documents in which ICAO and the European Union restate its operative rules in their own binding or model language. The first is ICAO's Model Accident Investigation Authority Act, second edition, issued in unedited form in March 2017, which exists precisely so that states can transpose Annex 13 into national statute.

Section 6 of that model law carries the provision that defines the whole discipline: the sole objective of the investigation of an aircraft accident or incident shall be the prevention of accidents and incidents, and — in the model act's exact words — "It is not the purpose of this activity to apportion blame or liability." Not a secondary purpose. Not a purpose to be pursued with caution. Not a purpose at all.

The rest of the model act builds the wall that makes this possible. Section 7 requires that investigations by the authority "shall be conducted separate from investigations conducted for the purposes of establishing blame or civil or criminal liability." Section 9 provides that the safety investigation "shall have unrestricted access to all evidential material without delay and shall not be impeded by administrative or judicial investigations or proceedings." Section 10 requires the authority to be functionally independent of other state aviation authorities and of any entity that could interfere with the objectivity of an investigation. And Section 13 states that final reports "shall not be used as evidence in any court proceeding or in other proceedings related to apportioning blame or liability."

The reason for the wall is practical rather than sentimental. A safety investigation runs on candour: on pilots, controllers, engineers and managers describing what they actually did, including what they got wrong, to people who cannot prosecute them. Remove the guarantee and the flow of information stops, and with it the capacity to fix the fault before the next aircraft meets it.

The European Union has written the same principle into directly applicable law. Regulation (EU) No 996/2010, in the consolidated version in force since 19 May 2024 — as amended by Regulation (EU) No 376/2014, Regulation (EU) 2018/1139 and Regulation (EU) 2024/1230 — sets out in Article 1 that it aims to improve aviation safety by ensuring a high level of efficiency, expediency and quality of European civil aviation safety investigations, "the sole objective of which is the prevention of future accidents and incidents without apportioning blame or liability". Article 17(3) is blunter still: "A safety recommendation shall in no case create a presumption of blame or liability for an accident, serious incident or incident."

The protections are not absolute, and the regulation is honest about where they end. Article 14 shields the most sensitive categories of material — witness statements, investigators' notes, drafts, cockpit voice and image recordings, air traffic control recordings — from use for any purpose other than the safety investigation. Article 14(3) then supplies the escape valve: the administration of justice, or the authority competent under national law to decide on disclosure, may decide that the benefits of disclosing those records for other purposes permitted by law "outweigh the adverse domestic and international impact." A judge, in other words, can open the box. The rule is a strong presumption, not a vault.

Because both a safety inquiry and a criminal inquiry can be running over the same wreckage, Article 12(3) requires member states to put advance arrangements in place between their safety investigation authorities and their judicial and other authorities, covering access to the site, preservation of evidence, debriefings, the exchange of information and how conflicts between the two are to be resolved. The arrangements are meant to be negotiated before an accident, not during one.

The second widely held misconception concerns who does the investigating. ICAO does not. Its own public guidance states that "ICAO officials only participate in accident investigations upon special request from the State responsible for conducting the investigation." The organisation writes the Annex, maintains the reporting system and audits how states apply the rules; it does not staff the hangar. The investigation belongs to the State of Occurrence, which may delegate it to another state or a regional investigation body and may, in ICAO's phrasing, call on the best technical expertise available from any source.

Other countries get in through defined doors rather than by diplomatic pressure. Annex 13's own provisions on participation could not be read for this article, but the European regulation restates the same architecture in text that can be: Article 10(1) of Regulation 996/2010 addresses the member states that are the State of Registry, the State of the Operator, the State of Design and the State of Manufacture, each of which is to say whether it intends to appoint an accredited representative to an investigation. That is the mechanism by which a manufacturer's home authority comes to be involved in an inquiry into an aircraft flown and owned elsewhere. The same regulation gives narrower rights to a state whose citizens were killed or seriously injured: it may appoint an expert entitled to visit the scene of the accident, to have access to the relevant factual information and to information on the progress of the investigation, and to receive a copy of the final report.

One further feature separates this system from a genuine world law. Annex 13's Standards bind through the Convention's own compliance machinery, and where a state finds it impracticable to comply, ICAO's material on the Electronic Filing of Differences — including a presentation delivered to its Asia and Pacific workshop on 17 February 2025 — describes the obligation as one to notify the organisation of the difference between national regulation and the international Standard. Compliance is monitored and published; it is not automatic. The rule is uniform on paper, and filed against in practice.

So the report, when it finally arrives, is doing something narrower and more useful than the public expects. It reconstructs a sequence, identifies causes and contributing factors, and issues safety recommendations that create no presumption of anyone's fault. Courts, regulators and insurers then conduct their own proceedings, on their own evidence, to their own standards of proof. Reading a final report as a judgment is not merely a misreading of that document. It is a misreading of the bargain that made the document possible.