By several indications, the Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP) of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Air Traffic Organization is moving beyond the initial growing pains of this voluntary, non-punitive safety reporting method for air traffic control (ATC). The volume of ATSAP reports already dwarfs that of an older parallel program, and the quality and significance of report content have been praised by independent safety analysts (see, “Voluntary Revelations”).
Recent refinements to ATSAP include efforts to improve strained working relationships, particularly around the notion of imposing — in a punitive sense — remedial study and practice for inadvertent noncompliance and operational errors by controllers. Last year, David Conley, president of the FAA Managers Association (FAAMA) and manager of tactical operations, Southwest United States, FAA, told a congressional committ…
