The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (DOT IG) is taking another look at a key FAA safety database, the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) system. In 2007, the FAA and airline industry partners set out to develop ASIAS to promote an open exchange of safety information. For the past 12 years, ASIAS has evolved and drawn together a wide variety of safety data and information sources across government and industry, including confidential data from air carrier voluntary safety programs. More recently, general aviation has been encouraged to participate.

In a 2013 audit, the DOT IG reported that FAA had made “significant progress with implementing and encouraging participation in ASIAS since 2007, and the program now captures key confidential voluntary safety data from 95 percent of all Part 121 operations.” However, the FAA’s plans to use ASIAS to predict safety risks “are still years away, and the program [at that time] does not yet contain data from non-commercial sectors of the aviation industry.”

A follow-up review of the agency’s efforts and plans to improve the system is scheduled to start later this month, the result of a requirement in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. The DOT IG said, “Our objectives will be to assess the FAA’s progress with implementing ASIAS and plans to improve the system, including its predictive capabilities, and efforts to more widely disseminate results of ASIAS data analyses.”