Aviation Safety

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is responsible for promoting safety in civil air transportation. GAO and the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General review FAA's safety programs, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates aviation accidents. The three organizations make recommendations to FAA aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of FAA's activities and functions and at improving aviation safety. This report answers the following two questions: What is FAA's overall record in responding to, agreeing with, and implementing significant recommendations made by GAO and the Inspector General from 1990 to 1994, as well as recommendations made by NTSB or added to NTSB's "Most Wanted" lists of safety recommendations during that same period? To what extent have GAO's recommendations concerning aircraft certification, airline inspections, and oversight of foreign carriers and NTSB's recommendations concerning safety on runways been fully implemented?

GAO found that: (1) FAA generally concurred with the recommendations made by GAO, NTSB, and DOT's Inspector General and had implemented the majority (64 percent) of them as of October 1995; (2) however, FAA met the established implementation time frames only about one-third of the time for GAO's and the DOT Inspector General's recommendations; (3) GAO could not readily measure FAA's on-time performance for NTSB's recommendations because FAA had not included in most of its initial responses to NTSB the estimated time frames for implementing most of NTSB's recommendations that GAO reviewed; (4) while FAA's initial responses to NTSB's and the DOT Inspector General's recommendations were almost always made within the required time frames, FAA never met the statutory time frames for responding to the congressional committees on GAO's recommendations included in this review, nor did it establish the required completion dates for some of GAO's and the majority of NTSB's recommendations included in this review; (5) delays in initially responding to recommendations may slow FAA's progress in taking actions to resolve the issues that led to the recommendations, and without estimated completion dates, there are no milestones against which implementation progress can be measured; (6) for the 18 specific recommendations on which GAO conducted detailed field work, FAA has taken actions on or had actions in process on 17 of them to improve its aircraft certification process, its airline inspections, its oversight of foreign carriers, and the safety of airport runways; (7) however, GAO found that the status shown in the tracking systems for some of NTSB's recommendations did not reflect the actual status of on-the-ground actions; (8) of the seven recommendations by NTSB that GAO reviewed in the field, five were listed in the tracking systems as closed (i.e., implemented by FAA); and (9) but, for four of these five recommendations, actions remained to be completed, primarily by affected airports, to fully resolve the problems that gave rise to the recommendations.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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