ALPA Helps Lead the Way in Mitigating Flight Safety Risks

Editor’s note: In celebration of ALPA’s 95th anniversary this year, this nine-part Air Line Pilot series revisits some of the union’s “wins”—successful campaigns, projects, and products that make public air transportation safer and more secure and that improve the working lives of the union’s members.

ALPA Wins, Part 8: Voluntary Reporting Programs

For many decades, airline pilots were reluctant to report issues they witnessed on the flight deck or during airline operations for fear that these might be viewed as performance deficiencies. At a time when the vast majority of aircraft accidents were still attributed to pilot error, rather than to a causal chain of events, pilots remained silent about many of the operational issues they encountered because they feared that, in reporting these events, they would lose their jobs.

To address this concern, ALPA actively advocated that pilots should be able to speak freely and share their experiences, without fear of reprisals, as they’re in a unique position to observe and collect an inordinate amount of aviation safety and security data—information that would be beneficial to airlines, the aviation industry, and, ultimately, the traveling public.

With basic pilot protections now in place, an enormous amount of safety data is being shared. Today, through the Association’s continued engagement with government and the aviation community, information sharing is playing a vital role in efforts to improve the industry’s impressive safety record.

Identifying Risks, ASAP

On January 8, 1997, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued Advisory Circular (AC) 120-66, creating the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP). The program enables airline pilots to report safety errors, operational mistakes, and regulatory deviations without fear of FAA enforcement or company discipline to “increase the flow of safety information to both the air carrier and FAA.”

Because ASAP is a voluntary safety program, individual airlines, the FAA, and pilot groups need to enter into a formal agreement, such as a memorandum of understanding, for the program and the protections to apply. All three parties play a critical role in administering a successful safety program.

Prior to the inception of ASAP, in 1976 NASA and the FAA established the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). Similar to ASAP, ASRS collects safety data while providing protections for FAA enforcement action if a pilot has inadvertently violated a regulation. One significant difference between the two programs is that ASRS reports are handled by NASA, whereas ASAP reports are managed “in house” by an Event Review Committee composed of representatives from the airline, the FAA, and the pilot union who jointly review each incident and collectively determine corrective actions.

Acknowledging the groundbreaking creation of ASAP, Capt. Randy Babbitt, then ALPA’s president, observed, “[Z]ero accidents is the goal of a shared responsibility of government, industry, and labor organizations. Everyone in the aviation community must work together for more knowledge, better training, more effective procedures, greater emphasis on data collection, and information reporting. Certainly, this is a grand vision, but it must become a reality if we are to continue reducing our airline accident rate.”

Prior to the ASAP announcement, the FAA had experimented with similar initiatives at Alaska, American, and USAir. The AC noted, “These programs included incentives to encourage employees of air carriers participating in the programs to disclose information and identify possible violations of the federal aviation regulations without fear of punitive legal enforcement sanctions.”

Three subsequent ACs updated the ASAP directive, including the most recent, AC 120-66C, issued on March 31, 2020, which provided broader discretion regarding report filing timeframes. It also outlined specific exceptions for immunity, including “intentional falsification, reckless or criminal behavior, substance abuse, alcohol, or actions outside the scope of employment.”

Although the Canadian aviation industry doesn’t employ ASAP, Canadian airlines operate under equivalent voluntary confidential safety reporting programs. While the exact cumulative number of ASAP reports filed by airline pilots isn’t publicly available, the vast majority have been “sole source;” therefore, most safety events identified through ASAP would never have been acknowledged if not for this landmark program.

Case in Point

Imagine a hypothetical event in which a flight crew inadvertently accepts an air traffic control clearance intended for a similarly identified aircraft, prompting potential confusion about a runway assignment. The problem is quickly recognized and addressed by an experienced senior pilot, who later submits an ASAP report explaining what happened and why it’s a concern.

The airline’s Event Review Committee evaluates the details of the report and, instead of reprimanding the pilot, uses the systemic problem to recommend changes to pilot training to improve future communication with ATC. The airline then shares the deidentified incident through the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) system—the national safety-data program that integrates multiple aviation databases to identify risks, monitor trends, and support safety improvements across U.S. aviation—to help ensure that other carriers don’t encounter the same problem, thus providing a system fix.

Quality Assurance

Following a cluster of airline accidents, on February 9, 1995, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Federico Peña, FAA Administrator David Hinson, and Babbitt conducted a joint press conference. The event was a follow-up to a safety summit held the month before, and the trio announced a 63-page Aviation Safety Action Plan with 173 FAA/industry initiatives.

Among the proposals identified was the creation of voluntary Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) programs at U.S. airlines to collect and evaluate line operations safety data. The goal was to identify hidden operational risks, unsafe events, and unstable approach precursors to prevent potential accidents or incidents. Participating airlines would allow operational parameters to be downloaded from their aircrafts’ digital flight data recorders, including speed and throttle settings, altitudes, and headings.

The April 1995 issue of Air Line Pilot noted, “ALPA and the Air Transport Association [a forerunner to Airlines for America] jointly urged the FAA to encourage airlines to establish FOQA programs and to grant airlines and their employees immunity from FAA enforcement action for use of FOQA data.”

“[ALPA] has supported the use of flight data recorders as a safety research and monitoring tool since 1986. As early as the 1960s, several pilot groups had negotiated contract provisions that would permit quality assurance programs,” Babbitt remarked.

The FAA issued AC 120-82 on April 12, 2004, establishing the framework and guidelines for developing, implementing, and operating FOQA programs. Subsequent studies reported a significant decline in flight deviations the longer a carrier participates in the program. More than 150 airlines worldwide, including Canadian carriers, now have FOQA programs, also referred to as flight data monitoring.

Sharing Data

Unlike ASAP and FOQA, the FAA implemented ASIAS in October 2007 as a joint government-industry collaborative initiative, connecting multiple previously isolated safety databases into a single, comprehensive data-fusion utility to monitor known risks, evaluate the effectiveness of deployed mitigations, and detect emerging hazards to reduce the potential for accidents.

Since its creation, ASIAS has been a conduit for exchanging voluntary safety data between the FAA and the U.S. aviation community, providing valuable information that all participating airlines can benefit from. For example, the system has helped identify factors leading to unintended deviations from assigned arrival or departure procedures. These deviations, if left unaddressed, could have increased the risk of a midair collision.

ALPA strongly advocated for and actively supports ASIAS data-sharing networks. The Association has partnered with ASIAS since its inception, ensuring that frontline pilot perspectives, safety-data protections, and operational experiences influence policy and procedural decisions.

The Association was the co-recipient of the prestigious 2008 Robert J. Collier Trophy as a charter and core member of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST), which employed safety data systems including the foundations of ASIAS to dramatically decrease airline fatality risks. CAST brought together the FAA, airlines, manufacturers, and labor groups like ALPA to analyze flight data and implement tangible safety enhancements, and together they reduced the U.S. commercial aviation fatality risk by 83 percent between 1998 and 2008.

Working Proactively and Collaboratively

ASAP, FOQA, and ASIAS have paved the way for the next generation of organization-wide risk management, including programs like Safety Management Systems. Together, they’re all part of a larger strategy to better engage and build trust with industry partners as well as share information. The reason for this approach is simple.

“Voluntary safety reporting programs are the core of aviation safety risk management that provide critical data and unique information,” said Jason Ambrosi, ALPA’s president, in a written statement to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on February 7, 2023. “These programs allow us to identify risk in the system before an accident occurs so that the changes necessary to mitigate the risks can be implemented.”