Aviation Safety

After spending four years and more than $7 million on the Safety Indicators Program, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has made little progress in either coming up with a set of air safety measures or developing a computer system to: (1) quickly and vividly depict the state of air safety; and (2) support decisions on possible changes to safety activities. These measures, or indicators, are meant to bring emerging issues to the attention of top-level FAA officials and facilitate more aggressive management of the agency's safety mission. Ineffective user involvement and unclear management commitment have hindered FAA's completion of the program. Although an agency task force issued a report in mid-July on the indicators program, completion of the program is still years away, and problems with source data reliability remain a formidable challenge.

GAO has found that: (1) FAA has accomplished little towards its program goals; (2) development of the indicators has been delayed due to ineffective user involvement and unclear management commitment, which have also delayed development of a necessary decision support system that would integrate data from multiple sources; (3) FAA has recently redirected the program in an attempt to accelerate the identification of indicators, but less detailed indicators are being developed, which may defeat the program's goals; (4) the safety-related databases that could supply source data to the program are inaccurate, inconsistent, and often incompatible; and (5) FAA has not responded to earlier GAO recommendations that it develop a program plan that provides for effective user involvement, requisite funding, and source data integrity.