Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that justme69 feels that the aviation industry has been asleep at the helm in scientific analysis of aviation safety.
As PJ2 says.
Data analysis is, as you suggest, proactive, and is looking for both trends and incidents/events. In many arrangements, calls to the crew are made not by management but by the pilots' own peers usually through an agreement with the airline. The program is extremely effective in discovering what the airplanes and crews are doing on a daily basis.
TEM, FOQA, etc, have been in use for more than a decade, along with several other equally important programs.
The Flight Safety Foundation is a good source of links to what has been, and is, going on.
Here is link to one (of many) TEM articles:
http://www.flightsafety.org/pdf/tem/...pt_12-6-06.pdf