Lessons learned from aerial platform accident statistics

Looking at the latest data, there were 736 reported incidents in the period from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2020, which involved 768 people. These included 168 incidents causing damage to machine or property, 159 near-misses, 178 minor injuries, 72 major injuries and 172 fatal-injury reports, from 15 different countries, involving 195 people and 174 deaths. In total, reports were entered on to the IPAF accident portal from 19 different countries

Overall trends show that reported numbers are going down, but that the proportion of lost-time incidents (LTIs) is increasing. This is encouraging in one sense, as it means that fatal and serious accidents are increasingly being captured, but it does flag up that more can be done to build up a stronger database of minor accidents and near-misses.