Information sharing challenges at the Federal Aviation Administration may impact the agency's ability to analyze safety data, says the Government Accountability Office.

In a report dated Oct. 5 that wasn't posed online until Oct. 13, the GAO notes that the agency has adopted a nonpunitive reporting safety reporting program for air traffic controllers and a risk analysis process that, for now, just analyzes the severity and repeatability of incidents involving airplanes coming too close to each other.

Yet, although those two programs--the Air Traffic Safety Action Program and the Risk Analysis Process, respectively--look at some of the same incidents, program officials use different categories to describe them.

In addition, the Air Traffic Quality Assurance, a key database of incident information, lacks the capability to sort data according to the region or facility in which they occurred, FAA officials told GAO auditors. Also, employees lack a single, central source to make available all safety-related data sources, the report adds.

The report is primarily about FAA safety measures at and around airports. It says the rate of runway incursions at airports with air traffic control towers has trended steadily upward. In fiscal 2004, there were 11 incursions per million operations at these airports; by fiscal year 2010, the rate increased to 18 incursions per million, says the report. FAA officials say the increase is primarily attributable to changes in reporting, including the rollout of ATSAP--a position the GAO mostly agrees with.

The report notes that an error detection system that can automatically capture losses of separation between aircraft that occur in the vicinity of airports is already capturing errors that previously weren't reported by air traffic controllers. The system, Traffic Analysis and Review, is currently used an audit tool approximately 2 hours a month at some facilities, FAA officials told auditors, with further implementation on hold until the FAA evaluates the impact on controllers and determines to handle the additional investigatory workload that will result from wider implementation.

The number of reported incursions also increased following roll out of a ground traffic surveillance system known as Airport Surface Detection Equipment, Model X, the report adds.

Nonetheless, the increased number of reported incursions "may also reflect some real increase in the occurrence of safety incidents," the report says.

FAA officials said they are migrating ATQA data into a new system called the Comprehensive Electronic Data Analysis and Reporting system, and that CEDAR should "address many of the deficiencies identified by regional and local offices."

FAA officials also said ASTAP and RAP officials are developing a common set of contributing factors, as well as a translation capability that will allow past reports to be analyzed comprehensively.

For more:
- download report, GAO-12-24 (.pdf)

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