Aviation safety is a priority goal for FAA. That priority is reflected in the Administration’s budget for fiscal year 2008, which requests $1.9 billion to promote aviation safety and efficiency. To the credit of FAA and the aviation industry, U.S. commercial aviation has had an extraordinary safety record in recent years. In 1997, FAA established a goal to reduce the commercial fatal accident rate by 80 percent in 10 years and for many years the agency has made incremental progress toward that goal. However, increased air traffic, leading to congestion and delays, is straining the efficiency and potentially the safety of the nation’s airspace system. Moreover, while commercial aviation safety trends have been positive over the last several years, FAA did not meet its performance target for commercial aviation accidents last year and does not expect to meet its target for 2007. If air traffic triples as expected over the next two decades and the accident rate of recent years is unchanged, there would be nine fatal commercial aviation accidents each year, on average. To maintain a safe and efficient airspace system, especially if substantial growth in the industry materializes, it will be important for FAA to have well-established, efficient, and effective processes in place to provide an early warning of hazards that can lead to accidents. It will also need a skilled workforce to implement these processes. FAA is moving to a system safety approach to oversight and has established risk-based, data- driven safety programs to oversee the industry and a workforce that includes approximately 4,500 safety inspectors and engineers to implement those programs, about 15,420 air traffic controllers, and nearly 7,200 technicians responsible for maintaining FAA’s air traffic control equipment and facilities. In addition, FAA leverages its inspector and engineer workforce through its “designee” programs, in which about 13,400 private individuals and over 200 organizations have been delegated to act on the agency’s behalf. Our recent work has identified data limitations and human resource challenges facing the agency that affect its ability to implement these programs and oversee aviation safety. FAA’s ability to identify and respond to trends and early warnings of safety problems and to manage risk is limited by incomplete and inaccurate data. While FAA has developed risk-based processes for monitoring and inspecting the aviation industry, in some cases, the implementation of those processes is hampered by the lack of reliable and complete data, which are important for identifying and mitigating safety risks. In other cases, FAA does not fully utilize the data it collects by evaluating or analyzing it for nationwide safety trends. For example, FAA does not collect actual flight activity data for general aviation operators and air taxis. Instead, the agency uses an annual survey to query a sample of registered aircraft owners about the activity of their aircraft during the previous year. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) noted a number of problems with these data, such as historically low response rates, and concluded that FAA’s data do not accurately portray changes in general aviation activity. As a result, FAA lacks information to monitor the rate of general aviation accidents, which decreased from 1,715 in 2002 to about 1,500 in 2006. (See fig. 1.) Therefore, the agency cannot meaningfully evaluate changes in the number of general aviation accidents or determine the effect of its general aviation safety initiatives. NTSB made a number of recommendations to FAA to improve the accuracy of the survey data, such as improving the currency of aircraft owner contact information. As another example, FAA does not collect basic data to measure changes in the air ambulance industry, such as flight hours or number of trips flown. From 1998 through 2005, the air ambulance industry averaged 11 accidents per year, peaking at 18 accidents in 2003. (See fig. 2.) Without data about the number of flights or flight hours, FAA and the air ambulance industry are unable to identify whether the increased number of accidents has resulted in an increased accident rate, or whether it is a reflection of growth in the industry. Data describing the safety trends of the industry are essential to understanding the impact of FAA efforts to improve air ambulance safety. In addition, while FAA receives important data, including self-reporting of safety violations, through its partnership programs with industry, the agency does not evaluate this information for nationwide trends. According to FAA officials, the Aviation Safety Action Program, Aviation Safety Reporting Program, and Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Program allow the agency to be aware of many more safety incidents than are discovered during inspections and surveillance. Although FAA tracks the actions taken to resolve the individual safety violations that it learns about through these programs, it does not evaluate such information in the aggregate to identify trends in violations and their potential cause in order to improve safety. We recommended that FAA develop a continuous evaluative process for its industry partnership programs, and use it to create measurable performance goals for the programs and track performance towards those goals. FAA has not taken these actions, but has begun to address other data issues. FAA recognizes the critical nature of the issues associated with its data. To address its data limitations, FAA is in the early stages of planning the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing system—a comprehensive new data system that is expected to provide the agency with access to a vast amount of safety data that reside with entities such as NTSB and industry partners including airlines and repair stations. Working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), FAA began planning for the new system in 2006. Because this activity is in the early planning stages, our concerns about FAA’s data remain relevant. The fiscal year 2008 budget for FAA proposes $32 million for safety databases and computer systems. As FAA prioritizes the activities that it undertakes with such funds, it will be important to continue addressing these critical data limitations. Changes to FAA’s oversight programs, such as the planned rapid expansion of the Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS), from 16 air carriers in 2005 to approximately 115 air carriers by the end of 2007, will pose workload challenges for FAA’s safety inspector workforce of about 3,600. As FAA moves air carriers under the ATOS program, it will also move inspectors to the program. As of January 2007, the 51 air carriers in ATOS were overseen by 829 safety inspectors. Unlike other FAA inspection programs, ATOS inspectors are dedicated to an air carrier and generally cannot be used to inspect other entities. Inspectors who are not part of ATOS, on the other hand, have duties in addition to inspecting air carriers—such as overseeing repair stations, designees, and aviation schools, and investigating accidents. In prior work, we found that about 75 percent of the non-ATOS inspectors had responsibility for more than 3 entities and about half had responsibility for more than 15. In addition, we found that ATOS requires more inspectors per airline than the traditional inspection approach. As inspectors are transitioned to ATOS, the remaining inspectors will have to add those other entities to their workload. With the expansion of ATOS that will continue into fiscal year 2008, it will be important to monitor the magnitude of the shift in resources and the effect it may have on FAA’s overall capability to oversee the industry. Part of the challenge that FAA faces with regard to safety inspectors is improving its process for determining staffing needs. This is especially important as oversight activities and workload shifts with the expansion of ATOS and other program changes, yet FAA lacks staffing standards for safety inspectors. The National Academy of Sciences, under a congressional mandate, recently completed a study for FAA that analyzed FAA’s staffing processes for safety inspectors. The study identified a number of issues that FAA must address when developing a staffing model for safety inspectors. For instance, the study included concerns that the current staffing process does not focus resources in the areas of greatest need and the match between individual inspectors’ technical knowledge and the facilities and operations they oversee is not always optimal. The study recommended a process for FAA to follow to develop a staffing model and identified key factors—such as changes in aircraft and systems, changes in FAA oversight practices including a shift to a system safety approach through programs like ATOS and increasing the use of designees, and new knowledge and skill demands—that should be considered in developing the model. In response to the Academy’s recommendations, FAA expects to develop a staffing model, but the agency does not have a specific timeframe for initiating this effort. With nearly $1 billion of the fiscal year 2008 budget request for FAA covering personnel compensation and benefits for aviation safety and operations, these workload and staffing challenges are critical to address. During the coming decade, FAA will need to hire and train thousands of air traffic controllers to replace those who will retire and leave for other reasons. FAA estimated it will lose 10,291 controllers, or about 70 percent of the controller workforce, during fiscal years 2006 through 2015, primarily due to retirements. To replace these controllers and accommodate increases in air traffic while accounting for expected productivity increases, FAA plans to hire a total of 11,800 new controllers from fiscal year 2006 through 2015. In fiscal year 2006, FAA hired 1,116 controllers. The Administration’s budget for fiscal year 2008 proposes about $4.4 billion for salaries and benefits for the air traffic organization account, which includes FAA’s large air traffic controller workforce. The fiscal year 2008 proposal includes FAA’s plans to hire 1,420 air traffic controllers, which would bring the total number of air traffic controllers to about 15,000. Figure 3 shows the estimated losses each year as well as the number of planned hires. Recent events may exacerbate the hiring situation. Data indicate that controllers are retiring at a faster rate than FAA anticipated. FAA projected 341 retirements for fiscal year 2005; 465 controllers actually retired—36 percent more than FAA’s estimate. Similarly, in fiscal year 2006, 25 percent more controllers retired than FAA projected.