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Subcommittee on Aviation Hearing on Adequacy of FAA Oversight of Passenger Aircraft Maintenance TABLE OF CONTENTS(Click on Section) PURPOSE The purpose of this hearing is to examine the adequacy of FAA oversight of passenger aircraft maintenance and the safety of the nation’s airlines with a focus on the effectiveness of FAA’s new inspection system known as the Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS). BACKGROUND A key to ensuring the safety of our nation's traveling public is to have an effective system for inspecting and maintaining airplanes. Data on fatal accidents suggests that air safety is improving. While aircraft hours flown has more than doubled since 1982, National Transportation Safety Board statistics show that the accident rate has gone down. Annual major accident rates in the 1980s ranged from 0.25 to 0.92 major accidents per million hours flown. In the 1990s, the major accident rate ranged from 0 in 1998 to a high of 0.44 in 1996. In most years, the rate was below the lowest rate achieved in the 1980s. As the nation's aviation safety regulator, the FAA and its safety inspectors are responsible for ensuring compliance with the Federal aviation regulations. While the airlines are responsible for operating their aircraft in a safe manner, the FAA is responsible for examining an airline's operations when the airline seeks a certificate to operate and for conducting ongoing inspections to ensure continued compliance with safety regulations. The Office of Flight Standards Service at FAA issues and enforces the Federal Aviation Regulations that airlines must follow and gives guidance on how FAA's safety inspectors should perform inspections. It assigns a team of inspectors to each major airline. The FAA and the aviation industry rely on a series of overlapping controls to ensure aircraft maintenance is performed properly. The air carriers have their own internal maintenance and inspection programs. They use the Continuing Analysis and Surveillance System (CASS) to monitor the effectiveness of their aircraft maintenance and inspection programs. The FAA's 3,259 safety inspectors are responsible for certificating and conducting oversight of mechanics, flight schools, repair stations, air taxis, commuter airlines and large air carriers. If a violation of a regulation or certificate is found, the FAA may impose a civil penalty. In more serious cases, the FAA may suspend or revoke a carrier's operating certificate, essentially grounding that carrier. During the early 1980s, the FAA instituted a National Inspection Program, in which airlines were periodically subjected to an intensive, thorough inspection by a team of outside inspectors not usually assigned to that carrier. Since 1986, this program evolved into the National Aviation Safety Inspection Program (NASIP), which was an annual program of inspections performed according to national guidelines to ensure that air carriers and repair stations are complying with Federal aviation regulations and have an adequate system in place to sustain compliance. Over the past several years, a variety of General Accounting Office (GAO) and DOT Inspector General reports have been issued questioning the adequacy of the FAA's inspection process to ensure safety. Following the ValuJet and TWA 800 disasters in 1996, additional investigations and reviews of aviation safety and security were launched. These reports also made recommendations on how FAA could improve its oversight of maintenance functions. In May 1998, FAA responded to these concerns by redesigning the inspection system and creating the Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS). The purpose of the new system was to better enable FAA inspectors to analyze safety trends and identify potential problems before they led to an incident or accident. The system was to be data-driven and provide a more prospective and risk-targeted approach to safety. Under ATOS, an air carrier's operations have been separated into 7 systems, 15 subsystems, and 95 underlying component "elements" which provide the structure for conducting surveillance, collecting data, and identifying risks or areas of concern. Under ATOS, the FAA assigns a team of inspectors to oversee each airline. Approximately 457 of the FAA's 3,259 inspectors are assigned to the 10 ATOS teams. The FAA's guidance requires a comprehensive surveillance plan for each airline. The surveillance plan includes a series of inspection tasks to: 1. ensure that the airline has a safety system in place and 2. verify that the airline uses that system. The FAA also has developed guidance that describes the tasks to be performed for each type of inspection. The goal of this guidance was to standardize inspection activities across airlines and also provide a data template for reporting inspection results to the ATOS database. In October 1998, the FAA began implementing the first phase of ATOS. Ten major airlines are currently inspected via the ATOS system. These airlines are Alaska, America West, American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, Trans World, United, and US Airways. However, ATOS is not yet fully operational at any one airline. The ATOS is composed of 8 elements. The final two elements (analysis and implementation) are not yet functioning. FAA has indicated that it plans to issue draft policies and procedures for these elements this month, but these will still have to be field tested before they are finalized. Some of the concerns about the FAA's ability to ensure safety have included: an unstructured inspection process, inadequate 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. To address these concerns, the goal of ATOS is to identify risks by integrating the inspector's work with hard data. The ATOS database should identify emerging safety trends and direct inspectors to re-target surveillance based on data that is shared nationwide. ATOS IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES Beginning in October 1998, ATOS was to be phased-in over three years for all air carriers. However, ATOS is not yet fully implemented at any of the 10 major airlines (9 with the AA/TWA merger). Past reports indicate that FAA's guidance for inspectors has not been clear enough, resulting in confusion and inconsistency for inspectors. Also, data usefulness has been questioned. The 95 ATOS elements containing job aids with inspection tasks are still not complete and are currently being rewritten to make them more useful to inspectors. Ultimately, this drawn out implementation phase is not producing thorough and consistent data, limiting the usefulness of data for analysis and targeting. Before ATOS was created, FAA utilized a data analysis system with surveillance and safety information called the Safety Performance Analysis System (SPAS). All the data on the large carriers was in this system and used by inspectors. At one point, the two databases were not connected, but the FAA has indicated that now inspectors and analysts can access data in both systems. Finally, inspectors have raised concerns about inadequate training on both the ATOS concept as well as on airline specific issues. Clearly, the aviation environment is becoming more complex making the need for training even more critical. If ATOS works as it should, it will help FAA better utilize its limited number of inspectors to work on the most critical safety issues. The witnesses will focus on the issues above. In addition, the Inspector General will release a report evaluating the status of ATOS implementation.
WITNESSES
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