Regulatory Position & ICAO Annex 13

Under ICAO Annex 13, the State of Occurrence — or the State of Registry, Operator, Design or Manufacture by delegation — holds sole authority for the conduct of a safety investigation. SeyAero is a tool used by parties to that process. It does not, and cannot, conduct an investigation, appoint an investigator-in-charge, take custody of a recorder, or issue a finding.

Nothing produced by the platform constitutes an official report, a probable cause determination, or a safety recommendation within the meaning of Annex 13 Chapter 6, EU Regulation 996/2010, 49 CFR Part 831, or an equivalent national instrument. Only the competent authority issues those.

• ICAO Annex 13 — Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation, including §5.12 protection of records and Chapter 7 reporting formats.
• ICAO Annex 19 — Safety Management, and Doc 9859 Safety Management Manual, for precursor and near-miss analytics.
• ICAO Annex 12 — Search and Rescue, for the interface between wreckage localisation output and SAR coordination.
• ICAO Doc 9756 — Manual of Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation, Parts I–IV.
• EU Regulation (EU) No 996/2010 and Regulation (EU) No 376/2014 on occurrence reporting, including just-culture protections.
• United States: 49 U.S.C. §1101 et seq., 49 CFR Part 830 and Part 831, and NTSB party-process practice.
• National equivalents including UK AAIB (Civil Aviation (Investigation of Air Accidents and Incidents) Regulations), Australia TSB, Canada TSB (CTAISB Act), France BEA, Japan JTSB and Nigeria NSIB.

Annex 13 §5.12 restricts the disclosure of cockpit voice recordings and transcripts, communications between persons involved in the operation, medical and private information, statements taken during the investigation, opinions expressed in analysis, and airborne image recordings, except where the appropriate authority determines that disclosure outweighs the adverse domestic and international impact on future investigations.

The platform enforces this operationally: records may be classified as protected, protected classification restricts export and report inclusion, and every access to a protected record is written to the audit chain. Classification is a legal determination made by you, not by us; the tool enforces your determination but cannot make it.

Regulation (EU) 376/2014 and ICAO Annex 19 require that occurrence information not be used to attribute blame, except in cases of wilful misconduct or manifest, severe and serious disregard of an obvious risk.

The platform's hypothesis ranking scores causal mechanisms — configuration, system state, procedure, environment, organisational factor — and is deliberately structured around events and conditions rather than named individuals. Using its output to support disciplinary action against a named person, where the applicable just-culture regime prohibits it, breaches the Acceptable Use Policy.

Many jurisdictions restrict the admissibility of accident investigation reports in civil or criminal proceedings — for example 49 U.S.C. §1154(b) in the United States and Article 14 of Regulation 996/2010 in the European Union. Those restrictions apply to the underlying material regardless of the tool used to organise it.

What the platform contributes to a proceeding is provenance, not conclusion: a signed chain-of-custody manifest and hash-chained audit ledger allow a party to demonstrate that a given exhibit is the same artefact that was ingested, at the stated time, by the stated person, and has not been altered since. Whether the exhibit itself is admissible is a question for the tribunal and your counsel.

We will respond to lawful process directed at us by notifying the affected customer where legally permitted, producing the narrowest responsive material, and objecting where the request is overbroad or conflicts with the protection of safety information.

Where an operator, manufacturer or insurer uses the platform outside a state investigation — for internal SMS analysis, engineering fault correlation, or underwriting assessment — no Annex 13 mandate applies and the customer is the controller of everything it uploads. Such use must not interfere with, prejudge or publicly pre-empt an ongoing state investigation, and material obtained through party status is subject to the conditions imposed by the investigating authority.

SeyAero is not airborne software, is not installed on any aircraft, and performs no function required for continued airworthiness or flight operations. It is therefore outside the scope of DO-178C / ED-12C software certification, EASA Part-21 design approval and FAA TSO authorisation, and we make no such claim. Nothing produced by the platform may be used as the sole basis for a return-to-service decision, an airworthiness determination, or a continued-operation decision.