The Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP) in the United States has generated a far higher volume of voluntary safety reports from air traffic controllers1 compared with this work group’s historic reporting, new data show. Officials of the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) say that the candor, details and other subjective attributes of ATSAP report quality also have improved significantly since ASRS began processing copies of these reports on Nov. 12, 2009.
Before ATSAP was launched, ASRS — the 36-year-old program funded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and administered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center — had been the only independent U.S. program to directly receive such reports from controllers.
Controller reports in 2010 and 2011 jumped from about 1 percent of the previous total annual ASRS intake of reports to about 10 percent, says Linda Connell, program…
