Aviation Safety: FAA's New Inspection System Offers Promise, but Problems Need to Be Addressed.

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 over the past 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 nations airline operations. In the past, we and others have expressed concerns about the adequacy of FAAs inspection process to meet that challenge. Concerns about the inspection process focused on unstructured, nonsystematic inspections that produced few reports of safety problems and on the adequacy of inspectors technical training. These concerns also raised questions about the quality and consistency of the resulting inspection data and their usefulness for conducting analyses and targeting FAAS resources to the greatest safety risks. FAA has responded to these concerns by redesigning the safety inspection system that it uses to oversee the nations airlines. FAA began using the revised approach, called the Air Transportation Oversight System ATOS, for a limited number of airlines during the systems initial implementation on October 1, 1998. Currently, the nations 10 largest passenger airlines are under ATOS. At your request, we reviewed FAAS implementation of the new system.