On April 15, 2006, the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) celebrated its 30th year of continuous operation.

The longevity and success of the ASRS program are remarkable examples of how aviation system users can contribute their “lessons learned” to a government program that collects and analyzes this information to solve the issues associated with our modern aviation system.

The ASRS concept embodies a circle of information feedback that begins with pilots, controllers, maintenance technicians, flight attendants, dispatchers and others who voluntarily report their safety experiences to the program. During its 30-year history, the ASRS has analyzed this information and returned it to the aviation community through a wealth of safety products.

• More than 4,000 Safety Alert Messages provided to government and aviation industry decision makers.
  
  
• 7,100 database Search Requests in response to aviation community task force efforts, research studies, publications, safety promotion activities, accident investigations, and more.
  
  
• 317 issues of ASRS’s award-winning monthly safety bulletin, CALLBACK, which is delivered to more than 70,000 individual addresses by e-mail notification and U.S. Mail.
  
  
• Publication of more than 70 topical research studies, including completion of more than 124 Quick Response efforts examining all aspects of human and system performance.
  
• Public access to program information, publications, immunity policies, database report sets, reporting forms, and more on the ASRS web site at:
  http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov.

ASRS information feedback to the aviation user community allows a learning process to take place, and helps ensure that corrective actions will be appropriate and effective.

Progress towards safety goals often comes at a price, and the founding of the ASRS program was no exception. A tragic and potentially preventable airline accident became the catalyst for establishing a national aviation incident reporting system.

On December 1, 1974, TWA Flight 514 was inbound through cloudy and turbulent skies to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. The flight crew misunderstood an ATC clearance and descended to 1,800 feet before reaching the approach segment to which that minimum altitude applied. The aircraft collided with a Virginia mountaintop, killing all aboard.

A disturbing finding emerged from the ensuing NTSB accident investigation. Six weeks prior to the TWA accident, a United Airlines flight crew had experienced an identical clearance misunderstanding and narrowly missed hitting the same Virginia mountain during a nighttime approach. The United crew discovered their close call after landing and reported the incident to their company. A cautionary notice was issued to all United pilots.

Tragically, at the time there existed no method of sharing the United pilots’ knowledge with TWA and other airline operators. Following the TWA accident, it was determined that future safety information must be shared with the entire aviation community. Thus was born the idea of a national aviation incident reporting program that would be non-punitive, voluntary, and confidential.

The first step in establishing a national aviation incident reporting program was to design a system in which the aviation community could place a high degree of trust.

The FAA Administrator quickly recognized that the regulatory and enforcement roles of the FAA would discourage the aviation community from using a new safety program that depended on voluntary sharing of safety events. The FAA therefore assumed a sponsorship role for the new program, but turned to a neutral and highly respected third party – NASA – to collect, process, and analyze the voluntarily submitted reports.

Under a Memorandum of Agreement between the two agencies in August 1975, the blueprint for operating the newly designated Aviation Safety Reporting System was set in place: the FAA would fund the program and provide for its immunity provisions, while NASA would set program policy and administer operations. The ASRS program began day-to-day operation in April 1976.

The ASRS program has continually demonstrated the value of “safety lessons learned.” If a system’s users are encouraged to report the safety problems they encounter to a program they can trust, safety goals will be reached much sooner than if we never hear the stories of those lessons learned.

ASRS Safety Products Are AOK
with Program Users

ASRS program users often send us letters and e-mails telling us how they like, and use, the various data products produced by the program, from database Search Requests to CALLBACK. Along with the incident reports received by the program, this feedback helps us to stay wings level and on course. Here is what recent users of program materials have to say

About CALLBACK:

ASRS Future Developments

We don’t have a crystal ball that will reveal all of the innovations that ASRS will achieve as it continues to expand and evolve, but we can tell you about a few of the program enhancements that we are working on today: