Aviation Safety

The aviation industry has forecast a potential 66-percent increase in passenger travel from 1999 to 2008. The U.S. aviation accident rate, which has remained relatively constant during the last two decades, must be substantially lowered to avoid escalating numbers of aviation deaths as air traffic increases. A key to reducing the aviation accident rate is for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to have an effective process for inspecting the nation's airline operations. GAO and others have raised concerns about the adequacy of FAA's inspection process to meet that challenge. The report addresses the following questions: To what extent does the Air Transportation Oversight System address past concerns about FAA's aviation safety inspections? What factors, if any, surfaced during the system's implementation that could impede its success? What is FAA doing to address any factors that could impede the system's success? GAO found that the system is largely responsive to past concerns raised about key aspects of FAA's aviation safety inspections and the usefulness of inspection data.

GAO noted that: (1) ATOS is largely responsive to past concerns raised about key aspects of FAA's aviation safety inspections and the usefulness of inspection data; (2) these concerns centered on FAA's unstructured inspection process, the adequacy of technical training for inspectors, the quality and consistency of inspection data, and the usefulness of those data for identifying safety problems and targeting the agency's resources to the greatest risks; (3) addressing these concerns involved a fundamental redesign of the way FAA inspects the nation's airlines; (4) to improve inspection quality, the new program emphasizes a system safety approach that goes beyond spot-checking airlines for compliance with Federal Aviation Regulations; (5) using safety principles originally created for the nuclear industry, it calls for a systematic review of airlines' policies and procedures to ensure that they incorporate basic safety principles, such as clear lines of responsibility and written documentation; (6) it fosters more consistent, structured inspections by standardizing inspection tasks, linking inspectors' training more closely to their assigned responsibilities, and using teams rather than individual inspectors to perform many inspections; (7) the program also calls for a number of enhancements to improve the usefulness of inspection data for analysis and targeting; (8) they include a standardized database for reporting inspection results and the addition of data quality assurance managers and analysts; (9) the goal of this redesign is to target inspection resources to those areas that present the greatest safety risks; (10) ATOS offers promise for significantly strengthening FAA's inspection process, but FAA must also address the problems identified in this report to ensure that the new system fulfills its promise; (11) FAA's ability to conduct effective inspections remains limited by a lack of clear guidance, staff turnover, and continued difficulties with the adequacy of inspectors' technical training and experience; (12) the anticipated enhancements to make inspection data more useful have not been achieved because of problems with reporting requirements and the incompatibility of the program's database with FAA's primary inspection analysis system; (13) these problems resulted largely from FAA's decision to implement the new inspection system on an overly ambitious schedule; (14) meeting FAA's target date for implementation meant that complex, critical steps had to be compressed into a very short time; and (15) FAA management acknowledged that ATOS faces significant challenges.

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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