Aviation Safety Action Program

Aviation Safety Action Program



Aviation Safety Action Program

Introduction

The Aviation Safety Action Program is a voluntary, non-jeopardy reporting program developed through a joint agreement between the FAA, the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) and the participating commercial airline. Through this program pilots are encouraged to submit reports of safety events, including reports of Federal Aviation Regulation violations. These reports are then reviewed by a committee consisting of representatives from ALPA, the FAA and the airline. It is the task of this group to determine appropriate corrective action in response to the reported event.

Analysis

There are two main objectives of an ASAP. These objectives are supported not only by the airline we reviewed but describe the basic goals outlined in the FAA memorandum of understanding which must be agreed to by all carriers who begin an ASAP (Federal Aviation Administration, 2002):

Collect voluntarily reported safety information that would not have been known through conventional means and provide protection to the reporter.

Use this information to develop corrective actions to reduce the potential for reoccurrence of accidents, incidents or safety-related problems.

The first objective; to collect voluntary reports and provide protection to the reporter, was observed to be upheld by the program we reviewed. Currently this program receives between 1 to 3 reports per day. This rate was slightly higher before the events of September 11th at which point the report rate dropped off slightly, but has since returned to the previously retained rate. A review of the types of reports that were being submitted demonstrated that 88% of the reports described events that were not known by the FAA or airline management. The submission of these types of reports, commonly referred to as sole source, suggests that the program has established a level of trust with the pilot community. This statistic also demonstrates the unique perspective ASAP data may bring to a fairly comprehensive safety industry.

An overview of the types of pilot reports used by most ASAPs, (there are currently 25 airlines that have submitted proposals to the FAA to start an ASAP), demonstrated that the most common way for a pilot to submit an ASAP report is a narrative based model. Based on our review of the participating airline, this type of report contains a large section for pilots to complete a written description of the event. These types of forms also have limited number of categorizations used for labeling the ...