What's the difference betwen an Incident and an accident?

Question

My curiosity aroused while investigating about yesterday's brazilian crash of an Airbus A320 where 187 people died. I noticed that the NTSB differentiates the occurrence type betwen Incident and accident, why?..

Answer 1

Here's how I differentiate.

An accident is something that happened where no one caused it, no one deliberately did something to cause it ... it could be chance, negligence, careless, something broke.

We have had some space shuttle disasters ... when no one could have forseen the circumstances to avoid the disaster, it is an accident ... but if it is pretty obvious that a bunch of people collectively screwed up, then it is an incident.

An incident is where someone did something deliberately ... for example 9/11 was not an accident. When blue collar went on strike at place where I was working white collar, there were lots of times when rocks were thrown through people windshields, and people tires got slashed ... none of these were accidents, someone did it deliberately ... those are incidents.

Most terrorist events are incidents, because what happened could not possibly have been an accident.

Many work place injuries are avoidable ... someone was not trained properly, got careless, some equipment should have had hazards better labeled ... someone is to blame, so it is called an incident ... when it was unavoidable it is called an accident.

There will be times in a investigation where they don't know yet & may change the labeling when they do know.

Also, early in reporting of an event, there is some subjectivity by people who are guessing what the outcome of the investigation will be.

There have been a series of plane crashes in Brazil where there is a lot of suspicion that it was not an accident ... it is politically charged because of the # of people killed.

There may also be some tit for tat going on.
There was a plane crash in Brazil where the US pilots survived, and they are on trial for the murder of the Brazilian passengers ... now US investigations say it was an accident ... well if a Brazilian pilot crashed a plane in America, the investigation may be calling it an incident so that some Brazilian officials can be extradited to stand trial in America, then there be and exchange of prisoners ... drop charges against them, if Brazil drops charges against the US pilots from the earlier crash.

Here is info on the midair collision of two planes over Brazil
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.50.html#subj2.1

There were some later posts talking about this.

Here's the latest crash
http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news?ei=UTF-8&p=Brazil+Plane+Crash

http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news;_ylt=A0WTTkvgCKBGzywBPAPQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBhNjRqazhxBHNlYwNzZWFyY2g-?p=Brazil+Plane+midair+collision&c=&ei=UTF-8&x=wrt

For a plane to go off the runway, and crash into a gasoline station, sounds to me very much like a "landing" in Chicago that ended up at a nearby intersection, because the quality of the runways were marginal in snowy weather.

Here's info on a plane going off the end of the runway
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.15.html#subj3

Answer 2

an incident is an occurance of an event
and accident is collision which could cause injury or death to someone.
The police may have been investigating the accident where 187 people died the incident occured because possible negligence, or not wearing seat belts

Answer 3

It's based upon the dollar damage and whether or not there are any injuries or fatalities. Any fatalities is automatically an accident, as are serious injuries. Not sure where the line is drawn on property damage by the ICAO, though the military typically uses $1 million.

Answer 4

An incident is a near miss or something.

Answer 5

An accident is something that cannot be avoided, an incident is someting that could have easily been avoided.

Answer 6

If it involves the higher class it is an incident.

Answer 7

an "incident" is an event and an "accident" is a mistake