As government-industry exchanges of vast banks of operational data flourish, incident-level investigations by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) can appear to be out of step with the times. Some aviation safety professionals have seen the board’s approach to near-midair collisions (NMACs) as a case in point, specifically the latest requirement for operators to report certain resolution advisories (RAs) issued by traffic-alert and collision avoidance systems (TCAS II).1
Yet early indications are that NTSB investigations help to rapidly mitigate underlying risk factors of midair collisions, even if limited sometimes to a local application, while large-scale data analysis may take years to deliver system-level risk mitigations. Finding solutions either way has been extremely difficult, NTSB and U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials admit (
