Aviation Safety

Half of the work involved in maintaining and repairing U.S. commercial aircraft is done by independent repair stations. Records indicate that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is meeting its goal of inspecting repair stations at least once each year, but FAA cannot document how well it has followed up to ensure that the deficiencies found during inspections are corrected. FAA does not tell its inspectors what documentation to keep, and the resulting information gaps undermine the agency's ability to determine how will its inspections are working and to identify and react to trends. These documentation gaps are particularly important because FAA is spending more than $30 million to develop a reporting system that will use the documentation to make inspection decisions, such as where to apply the agency's inspection resources to address those areas that pose the greatest risk to aviation safety.

GAO noted that: (1) FAA's records indicate that the agency is meeting its goal of inspecting every repair station at least once a year; (2) GAO examined FAA's 1996 inspection records on about one-fourth of the 2,800 repair stations doing work for air carriers and confirmed that minimum inspection requirements had been met; (3) in addition, 84 percent of the inspectors GAO surveyed stated that they believed the overall compliance of repair stations was good or excellent; (4) however, more than half of the inspectors stated that there were areas of compliance that repair stations could improve; (5) FAA relies primarily on reviews by individual inspectors of most domestic repair stations; (6) in a few cases, FAA also uses teams to assess compliance at large, complex facilities; (7) at such facilities, a team approach has been shown to be more effective at identifying problems than visits by individual inspectors, uncovering more systemic and long-standing deficiencies; (8) a few of FAA's offices have recognized that the traditional approach of relying on one inspector may be inadequate in such situations and have begun to use teams to inspect large repair stations; (9) FAA officials acknowledge and support these initiatives; (10) GAO could not find sufficient documentation to determine how well FAA followed up to ensure that the deficiencies found during the inspections of repair stations were corrected; (11) FAA does not tell its inspectors what documentation to keep, and the resulting information gaps lessen the agency's ability to determine how well its inspection activities are working or to identify and react to trends; (12) these gaps in documentation are particularly important because FAA is spending more than $30 million to develop a reporting system that, among other things, is designed to use the documentation to make inspection decisions, such as where to apply the agency's inspection resources to address those areas that pose the greatest risk to aviation safety; (13) following the May 1996 crash of a ValuJet DC-9 in the Florida Everglades, FAA announced new initiatives to upgrade the oversight of repair stations; (14) these initiatives were directed at clarifying and augmenting air carriers' oversight of repair stations, not at ways in which FAA's own inspection resources could be better utilized; and (15) however, FAA does have three other efforts under way that would have a more direct bearing on its own inspection activities at repair stations.

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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