Methods for identifying unexpected risks in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) should be enhanced without delay as part of implementing the safety management system (SMS) of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), says an independent review. If upgrades to safety data collection and analysis fall behind the pace of NextGen advances, says the report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), national-level risk analyses could be based on insufficient or untrustworthy information.
“A senior FAA official [said] that although safety assessments had been conducted on individual NextGen technologies, until the agency has finalized [the National Level System Safety Assessment] modeling project, it cannot begin systemwide assessments of the safety of NextGen technologies and procedures that are already being deployed, including 700 new navigational procedures that had been deployed as of October 2009,” the report said. “Because some NextGen changes …
