A Contemporary Analysis of Aircraft Maintenance-Related Accidents and Serious Incidents

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Abstract/Title mapping to content:

The abstract is well written and clearly lays out a summary of the paper

Technical Comments:

Introduction

• Study rationale is described well and gaps are identified clearly in the rationale
• Commercial Air Transport (CAT) – Large Aeroplanes - this needs to be defined somewhere. How many passengers, max weight, passenger or cargo, etc.
• [Page 2, line 60]: "There is also suggestion that the most popular aircraft maintenance taxonomies presently in use can be difficult to apply to retrospective analyses" - can the authors provide sources for this claim?
• [Page 3, line 92]: "Global statistics also show similar trends" - can the authors provide source for this?

Methodology and Methods Used

• METHODOLOGY AND METHODS USED - Section title seems redundant. Maybe just stick to  - "METHODOLOGY"

• Interpretivist, Inductive Approach, and Grounded Theory need to be defined
• Minor: Primary data source should perhaps be listed before secondary data source
• Page 4: Need a source for bowtie model.
• The bowtie model needs to be explained in further detail including definitions for the different terms as those can mean different things in different contexts.
• Section 2.5 is too small and should be absorbed into previous section
• Cohen's kappa needs to be described better. A relevant example from this research can go a long way to understanding how the metric is used
• Overall the methodology section needs a better flow. It seems to be a collection of 4-5 sub sections that do not connect well with each other. The reviewer suggests adding a flowchart or high-level figure at the beginning of the section to show the different parts of the methodology and then describe each in detail in the subsections.
• The methodology section also lacks some detail on the coding and taxonomy development. Simply saying a particular software is used is not enough according to this reviewer. The authors should at least describe briefly how the software works in terms of inputs, outputs, limitations, etc.

Results and Discussion

• Why is good agreement on the kappa score an indicator of good rigor in the research? It is unclear
• On page 10, the authors have identified potential interdependent factors that could cause accident or incident but haven't clarified how their taxonomy or framework handles these scenarios
• How would the bowtie analysis change if the date range are modified? Have the authors explored that sensitivity?
• Is there one bowtie analysis expected for every top level event?
• The annotations for figure 4,5,6 should be described more clearly. What does each of the number in the annotation mean? Is there a significance to the size of the bubbles? The axis labels for the x-axis should be slightly lower so as not to get entangled in the bubble plot
• One of the elements lacking description in the paper is data collection, processing, cleaning, etc. required for this work

Conclusions Recommendations:

• Since the authors are doing wider year range, did they observe any unusual trends/changes in the wider year range compared to some studies that they cited were for a narrower year range?

Formatting Comments:

• The formatting of the paper is poor. The figures are not aligned in many cases and are pixelated.
• The paper also needs English language formatting

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments. Please find our responses in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

It would be abundantly helpful for the reader to have "serious incident" defined.  The authors' closest attempt at defining this is as 'reportable'.  For that matter, upfront, accident and incidents (specifically serious) should be defined early for context.  MxFACS is defined as an example.  While 'accident' may be defined externally (EASA), it wasn't referenced in the manuscript.

What is a KRA?  this is not defined either.

Does the acronym 'ARMS' refer to the Aviation Resource Management Survey?

Is a collision only an accident or can it be an incident as well?

Appendix 1; First column identifies "type of accident".  Some of the items are incidents and some are geographical locations, some undefined (type acft). Not well defined of these elements and if adapted from IATA, do they not define these more specifically?

Some tables and figures are centered on page and some are left justified.  Be consistent.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments. Please find our responses in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf