Yesterday a friend was about to fly as two-ship with me in a club aircraft and I noticed a small but bloody dent on the leading edge. The club aircraft was taken out of service and a MOR was filed.
This led me to wonder, what are the advantages and disadvantages of filing a MOR for minor matters in GA, I have the sense that daily countless little things happen on airfields and in cockpits that are strictly within the definition of a MOR but not considered ‘worth the paperwork’…
Is it really so much paperwork? Does it go on file somewhere to effect pilot licensing and/or insurance? If the airfield has filed a MOR on, say a birdstrike, is there any point in the pilot also doing so?
(ideally could we exclude airspace infringements from the discussion as that is well covered elsewhere)
Under EASA rules that came out about 18 months ago, it is mandatory.
So your question is really one of attitude to compliance.
What Timothy said. Filing an Occurrence Report is well and clearly defined by EASA. Given the energy expended, not so much on this forum but in another place, people seem to think (a) they are optional and (b) some kind of punitive measure.
In answer to the implication in the OP that it is a lot of “paperwork”, for my recent bird strike and diversion it took maybe five minutes to file online (no paper involved) and that was it. The report did not even get included in the monthly CAA summary of UK ones.
I’ll post a link to the relevant EASA pages shortly.
EASA page
https://www.easa.europa.eu/easa-and-you/safety-management/aviation-safety-reporting
Reporting portal page
http://www.aviationreporting.eu/AviationReporting/
Full lists of who must report what are in
EASA AMC 20-8
Google (or otherwise search) that term and you will get to it. The EASA website is, to use a technical term, pants so a direct link is not practical.
I wonder what the learning value is from a bird strike report.
It is probably similar to reporting hangar rash. It is similarly random and while the perpetrator is not going to be dead he will very likely not own up to it 
Peter wrote:
It is probably similar to reporting hangar rash. It is similarly random and while the perpetrator is not going to be dead he will very likely not own up to it
It’s probably going into some big data AI. After a few years the AI will find an “surprising” correspondence between bird strikes and seasonal bird migration
The same goes for fuel spillage, the smallest of which is reportable.
This is a typical example of losing the concept of “policing by consent”. By over-egging the pudding, they are putting people off the whole reporting system.
A properly functioning reporting system is the bedrock of aviation safety and for a bunch of anal bureaucrats to wreck it by pushing it too far is criminal.
Why don’t regulators know when to stop?
It is human nature to inflate one’s workload, if one is getting paid for it
If not getting paid, most people want to do as little as possible.
Honestly, the whole thing is silly, most people should almost be writing a MOR after every flight the triggering conditions seem so trivial (how often does a small amount of fuel get spilled when you sample your tanks?) – leading to a complete loss of respect for the system.
The regulators should ask themselves with respect to private flights in light aircraft: “if we don’t require X to be reported by a car driver, we should not require it for private flying either”. No one would report hitting a pigeon with their car. It’s absurd that it’s required for a Cessna 172.
Even worse is when reports can be used in criminal prosecution as in Switzerland: it kills the whole system, regardless of what the legal requirement may be
