ECCAIRS E5F Data Files
Originally the license to use of the ECCAIRS Reporting System was restricted to EU/EFTA competent authorities. In agreement with ICAO, the license to use the software has been extended to competent aviation authorities worldwide.
Subsequently, with the ambition to facilitate the reporting of occurrences by third parties to their national authority, this right has been further extended to include any organisation active in the field of aviation (airports, maintenance, operators...). The national authority should agree with such usage and provide support on ECCAIRS to these organisations.
If ECCAIRS is used both by the organisation and the competent authority involved, submission of a report can be done electronically using the proprietary ECCAIRS E5F file format.
The E5F file can also be produced by organisations not using the ECCAIRS software: this XML-based format is described in a dedicated White Paper available on this Portal, and designed to fully support the whole set of data fields and related data types in the used taxonomy (for instance, AVIATION contains 1000+ data fields).
RIT-E5X Data Files
In recent years, the aviation community in Europe decided to focus reporting on the mandatory data fields defined in EU Legislation, extended with a set of so-called essential data fields. This set of data fields is smaller that that of the full taxonomy, and is known as the Reduced Interface Taxonomy (RIT). The RIT contains currently a little over 280 data fields.
To support the provision of data based on RIT, a simplified version of E5F was developed and named E5X. The E5X format is XSD-based allowing a formal validation of the data before performing the actual submission to an authority. E5X can also be used to upload data in a local ECCAIRS Repository.
To facilitate the reporting of occurrences using E5X, the European Commission has made available the E5X Validation and Conversion website:
This website provides documentation on the E5X format, how to produce it and how to configure an ECCAIRS Repository for uploading E5X files, as well as E5X validation tools (on-line or via e-mail). On the same website you can also find the XSD data validation schemas for the various RIT versions available (each RIT has its own XSD).