Are NTSB Reports Admissible in Court?

Can the NTSB Report Be Used in Your Case? What 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) Says

The rule is short. Under 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b), "No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report."

The "Board" is the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency that investigates transportation accidents, including aviation accidents. A civil action for damages is a lawsuit in which an injured person or a family asks a court for money for losses caused by an accident, such as an injury claim or a wrongful-death claim.

Two words in the statute carry a lot of weight. "No part" means the bar is not limited to the narrative. The NTSB's probable cause, its statement of what it determined most likely caused the accident, is part of the report, so it falls within the bar too. "Used" means the bar reaches more than formally offering the report as an exhibit.

This is a rule Congress wrote into federal statute, not a rule of evidence that judges created case by case, so it applies to the report in a civil damages case whatever court the case is in.

For a person in your position, the practical meaning is plain: the report you may have read cannot simply be handed to a jury. The agency investigates for safety. The court decides responsibility from evidence the parties prove on their own.

Why the NTSB Investigation Will Not Decide Who Is Responsible for Your Loss

The NTSB's own rules explain why its report and a lawsuit are kept apart. Under 49 C.F.R. § 831.4, the NTSB conducts investigations "to determine the facts, conditions, and circumstances relating to an accident." It uses those results to determine one or more probable causes and to issue safety recommendations "to prevent or mitigate the effects of a similar accident."

If you are waiting on an investigation and hoping it will say who is to blame, the same regulation is direct about what the NTSB is not doing. Its investigations "are fact-finding proceedings with no adverse parties," and they "are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights, liabilities, or blame of any person or entity, as they are not adjudicatory proceedings." In plain words, nobody wins or loses an NTSB investigation, and nobody is found legally at fault in one. For a family, that means the investigation neither opens nor closes a legal claim: whether someone is responsible is a separate question, answered in a civil case on its own evidence.

The regulation also separates two kinds of output that may reach you. One is a report or brief of the NTSB's conclusions. The other is "other products," which "may include factual records, safety recommendations, and other safety information." That line, between the agency's conclusions and the factual records it gathers, becomes important in the next section.

Timing is part of the picture too. A preliminary report is an early factual account the NTSB releases while an investigation is still open. It is not a probable cause and not a finding of fault. A final report is where the NTSB states its probable cause. Both are reports of the Board, so the bar in 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) applies to each. The site's pages on the NTSB preliminary report and the NTSB investigation process walk through those stages in more detail.

For a grieving family, it can be hard to accept that the agency studying the crash does not decide who is responsible. The rules are built that way on purpose: the NTSB is answering a safety question, not a legal one.

What the Bar Does Not Reach: Underlying Evidence and Witness Testimony

The report is barred. The facts are not. A wing spar, a maintenance logbook or a witness's memory existed before the NTSB wrote anything, and the statute's text speaks to the Board's report, not to the underlying evidence.

Much of the evidence a family may later care about passes through the investigation. Under 49 C.F.R. § 831.13, the information the NTSB collects includes items "such as photographs, visual representations of factual data, physical evidence from the scene of the accident, interview statements, wreckage documentation, flight data and cockpit voice recorder information, and surveillance video." Anyone participating in the investigation who obtains that information "must be promptly provided to the NTSB, except where the NTSB authorizes the party to retain the information." The site's page on the NTSB docket explains the public file where factual records of an investigation are kept.

Recorder material follows its own federal rule. Under 49 U.S.C. § 1154(a), a party in a judicial proceeding generally may not use discovery, the court-supervised process of exchanging evidence, to obtain a cockpit or surface vehicle recorder recording, or any still image or part of a recorder transcript the NTSB has not made public. The exceptions are narrow. A court may allow discovery of more of a transcript, and of a recording only if the court finds the public material is not enough for a fair trial, after an in camera review, meaning the judge examines it privately. A court may allow discovery of a transcript the Board has not made public only if the recording itself is not available. When a court does allow discovery, it must issue a protective order limiting use to that case and barring wider sharing. Such material can be admitted into evidence only if the court places it under seal. Put simply, cockpit recordings and unreleased transcripts are generally off-limits, and reaching them takes a judge's private review and strict limits on how they are used.

So § 1154(a) and § 1154(b) do different work. Subsection (b) keeps the Board's report out of a damages case. Subsection (a) controls how cockpit and surface vehicle recordings, transcripts and still images can be reached at all.

If you were hurt, or a family member died, the records that usually matter include medical records, photos and video, the names of witnesses, and any incident or police reports, alongside what the investigation itself gathers.

Why the NTSB Report Still Shapes a Civil Case

The report cannot be admitted or used in the damages case, yet it still matters to the people living through one. It is often the first organized account a family sees of the flight: the aircraft, the operator, the sequence of events and the parts or systems the investigators looked at.

That account can help a family understand what happened and what questions remain. In a civil case, facts like these are proven through evidence the parties gather on their own, through discovery and through witnesses, rather than through the report.

How far the word "used" in 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b) reaches is a legal question, not something a family can settle by reading the statute alone. What is clear from the text is the line itself: the report is the NTSB's conclusion, and a civil case has to stand on evidence of its own.

The internal link pages on specific aircraft show what NTSB records look like in practice, for example the Cirrus SR22 accident records, and why each report's status matters.

Which State's Law Applies to Your Aviation Claim: How State Tort Law Governs

The admissibility bar is a narrow federal rule about one kind of document. The lawsuit itself is usually decided under state tort law, the body of law covering civil wrongs. In an aviation case that can include negligence (carelessness that causes harm), product liability (claims that a defective aircraft or part caused harm) and wrongful death (a claim by family members after a death caused by someone else's wrongful act).

Those rules are not the same across the country. Limitation periods, the deadlines for filing a lawsuit, differ from state to state, and so do the events that start the clock and the exceptions that pause or change it. Fault rules differ too: some states reduce what an injured person may recover by their own share of fault, and some treat that share more strictly. Damages categories, such as medical expenses, lost earnings, pain and suffering and wrongful-death damages, are defined by each state's law. No single state's rule, California's included, is the rule everywhere.

Federal law can also be part of some aviation cases, and the Death on the High Seas Act, a federal wrongful-death law for certain deaths at sea, is one example. Whether it or any other federal rule applies depends on where and how the accident happened.

Which state's law governs may turn on where the crash happened, where the people and companies involved are based, and where a case is filed. If those questions are open in your family's situation, a conversation with our attorney can help sort out which state's rules may apply and how their deadlines are measured.

What the NTSB Report Does and Does Not Decide in Your Case

A probable cause is not a verdict. The NTSB states it to explain an accident and prevent the next one, and its own rules say its investigations are not held to determine "rights, liabilities, or blame."

A civil negligence claim asks different questions: whether someone owed a duty of care, whether that duty was breached, whether the breach caused the harm, and what damages resulted. A product-liability claim asks whether a product was defective and whether the defect caused the harm. Those are legal inquiries, decided by a judge or jury under state law, from admissible evidence.

That difference cuts both ways. A family that reads a pilot-related probable cause in a final report may assume the legal question is settled. A family that reads an inconclusive finding, or only a preliminary report from an investigation that is still open, may assume there is nothing more to ask. Neither assumption follows from the report. An accident is not itself proof that anyone was negligent or that any part was defective, and whether the elements of a claim are met depends on the facts that can be proven.

For a person carrying grief or a long recovery, that may be the most useful thing to know about the report: it answers the NTSB's question, not yours.