The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provides members of the aviation community with a confidential, voluntary and non-punitive incident reporting system known as the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). NASA compiles the reports into a database, which is analyzed for safety issues and trends.
The aviation community first recognized the need for a national incident reporting system during the 1958 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Enactment hearings. However, time passed, and the FAA did not formally enact a reporting system until after the TWA 514 crash of December 1974. Responding to this accident and numerous other incidents since 1958, the FAA enacted the Aviation Safety Reporting Program (ASRP) in May 1975, followed by ASRS implementation under NASA in April 1976.
Air traffic controllers, pilots, aircraft dispatchers and other aviation-related personnel voluntarily submit reports to ASRS describing unsafe incidents and risky situations. NASA takes these reports, and concentrating on human factors, makes recommendations for the improvement of the national aviation system. An FAA advisory states that the reports will be received with a "constructive attitude" toward preventing future safety violations.
As a separate agency from the FAA, NASA can better ensure confidentiality and objective analysis.
When NASA receives an ASRS report via mail or electronically, workers immediately screen it for actionable hazards, eliminate the reporter's identification to protect confidentiality, match it to other already extant reports, then code and analyze it. After coding, the reporter is telephoned to confirm facts and check the quality of the report. ASRS professionals then enter the report's data into the system and destroy all original documents. When NASA encounters an actionable hazard, such as a defective navigational aid, an "Alert Message" is issued. This message has no authority, but the aviation community uses it to ensure safe air operations.
All ASRS reports are non-punitive, confidential and voluntary. The person reporting the safety violation is generally granted immunity from civil penalty and suspension of certificate if certain conditions are met.
The conditions for immunity are: the violation was inadvertent, the incident did not involve a criminal offense, the person reporting has no prior violations in the previous five years, and the person reported the violation to NASA under ASRS within 10 days of its occurrence. When NASA determines that there is no case for confidentiality, such as criminal activities or an aircraft crash, the report is promptly forwarded to the FAA, the Department of Justice or the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for further investigation.
The NASA ASRS produces a variety of reports and research data, such as "ASRS Directline," a quarterly safety bulletin and "CALLBACK," a monthly safety newsletter. In addition, the system provides the FAA and the NTSB with information necessary to facilitate a quick response to incidents and a searchable database to find specific events and trends.
According to NASA, pilots and other aviation members filed more than 723,427 incident reports from January 1976 to December 2006.
