IATA: Nearly Half of Air Accident Investigations Still Lack Published Final Reports

Nearly half of aviation accidents investigated under international rules still lack published final reports, IATA said. Safety director Mark Searle told the International Aviation Safety Summit in Montreal on November 12 that the publication rate has stayed close to 50%, and called the lack of progress unacceptable.

Two high-profile cases have no publicly available final report. One is the June 2025 crash of an Air India Boeing 787 shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, on June 12, 2025, which killed 241 people aboard and 19 on the ground. Investigators issued an interim update on the first anniversary. The other is the March 2022 crash of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735, which killed all 132 people aboard.

ICAO sets the reporting framework through Annex 13 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation. It calls for a preliminary report within 30 days and publication of a final report as soon as possible, ideally within 12 months. If an investigation stays open beyond a year, the state should publish an interim statement on each anniversary describing progress and any safety issues identified. A joint position paper from IATA and six other aviation organizations outlines these requirements.

That paper, published in February 2025, found that only 140 of 268 accidents recorded by IATA between 2018 and 2023 had completed investigations as of June 30, 2024. The other 128 cases, or 48%, lacked final reports. IATA's March 2026 safety report cited a 63% completion rate for accidents from 2019 through 2023. The figures cover different periods and reporting snapshots and are not directly comparable.

IATA's 2025 Annual Safety Report recorded 51 accidents across 38.7 million commercial flights, or 1.32 accidents per million sectors, down from 1.42 in 2024.

Causes of delay vary. They include extensive laboratory analysis, specialist engineering work, access to aircraft and operator records, coordination between countries, political sensitivity and judicial proceedings.

Cases involving suspected deliberate acts can be especially difficult when criminal inquiries run alongside independent safety investigations. Annex 13 investigations aim at prevention, while criminal inquiries seek to establish whether an offense occurred and who may be responsible.

A final report is the mechanism by which one accident's lessons reach the rest of the industry. It can prompt changes to maintenance procedures, pilot training, aircraft design, operating rules or regulatory oversight well beyond the airline or country involved. When the report is missing, other operators have no published basis for judging whether the same hazard sits in their own fleets, and families and the public lack an evidence-based explanation.

The gap is not a sign of a deteriorating safety record. Accident rates per million sectors fell between 2024 and 2025, so the issue is how fast and how completely findings are shared, not how often accidents occur. Without a final report in the China Eastern case, proposed explanations, including speculation about a deliberate act, cannot be treated as established findings.

IATA ties better publication rates to adequately funded investigative agencies, specialist expertise and safeguards for independent inquiries, and has called for coordinated international support where national investigative capacity is limited. The next concrete markers are the interim statements Annex 13 expects on each anniversary of an open investigation.