The AAI is the main force within the FAA, as well as everything dealing with the NTSB, when it comes to accident investigation. Their mission is to "investigate aviation accidents and incidents to detect unsafe conditions and trends and to coordinate the corrective action process- (1). When you read an NTSB accident investigation report you will come to a section called "recommendations-. The AAI has a big part in this. They are responsible for giving recommendations as well as making sure the FAA is complying with those regulations. Let's go in to a little detail of how they operate.
The main job of the AAI is the actual investigation. When they are doing their investigation there are several things they keep an eye out for. They look for "major or significant accidents and incidents to identify safety deficiencies and unsafe conditions which are then referred to the responsible program offices within the FAA for evaluation and corrective action- (1). Basically they aren't only looking for what happened but also why it happened. Once they determine this it is turned over, as the quote says, to responsible offices to fix it. Before they make their notifications though the AAI is responsible for analyzing the data they find. Included is a chart of "Preliminary Accident and Incident Data- (3). It shows the preliminary data that has been accumulated on accidents that have occurred within the last 10 days.
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Date Reports Entered .
Categories Dec 3 Dec 2 Nov 29 Nov 28 Nov 27 Nov 26 Nov 25 Nov 22 Nov 21 Nov 20 .
All Aircraft Events 6 14 18* 0 4 4* 22* 12* 13* 4 .
Fatal Accidents 0 2 2 0 2 1* 1* 0 2 1 .
Experimental/Homebuilt 0 2 4 0 1 1 4 2* 1 1 .
Miscellaneous 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .
FIXED WING .
Airbus 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1* 0 0 .
Boeing 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .
Beech 0 2 1 0 1 1* 1* 1* 1 2 .
Cessna 2 3 5* 0 1 0 6* 2 5* 0 .
Mooney 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 2* 1 0 .
Piper 0 1 6 0 0 1 3 1 1 0 .