Summary: To ensure the safety of the flying public, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspects airlines for compliance with aviation regulations. Last year, FAA inspectors identified about 300 regulatory violations and 1,900 unsafe practices on scheduled commercial airlines. Yet GAO found that FAA's inspection program contains many deficiencies that impede FAA's ability to ensure the safe operations of airlines. FAA lacks adequate information to help oversee its inspection program. In addition, FAA cannot effectively evaluate airlines' safety conditions because it does not (1) have adequate guidance for properly classifying airline problems, (2) assess the conditions inspectors found or evaluate their severity, and (3) know whether airlines are correcting problems. Since FAA will never have enough money and manpower to inspect all carriers all the time, it needs to make more effective use of its limited resources. FAA's Program Tracking and Reporting Subsystem--a computer-based system designed to provide data for planning and overseeing FAA's inspection program--does little to help the agency decide which carriers need more inspections and which need less. A system to systematically and uniformly determine risk could provide FAA with information vital to enhancing its inspection program. Although FAA has monitored the Defense Department's system for years, it has done little, until recently, to apply the concept of risk assessment to the management of its inspection resources.
